The Girl Next Door
by darkwinggirl
Summary: Cora Walker is the District Twelve tribute in the 76th Hunger Games. She has a risky strategy: Win sponsors by fiercely protecting the smallest, weakest tribute until the end. But will her genuine affection for the helpless boy in her care undo her plans?
1. Cora Walker

**Disclaimer: _The Hunger Games_ and its characters are copyrighted intellectual property owned by Suzanne Collins, not by me. This is a fan fiction intended for enjoyment only.**

**In an alternate timeline following _The Hunger Games_, Katniss and Peeta were not reaped for the Quarter Quell. Life has returned to normal in Panem. The Hunger Games continue as usual. Katniss and Peeta have become tribute mentors.**

** This is the story of the 76th Annual Hunger Games, from the Arena entry to the twenty-third cannon, told from the perspective of District Twelve tribute Cora Walker****. ****The Gamemakers have plenty of horrors planned for her: Personality-altering venom, flesh-eating flies, fires, earthquakes, and permanent night, to name a few. Can she survive it all while protecting Mika, the smallest, weakest tribute? Can she keep her humanity when the time comes for Mika to die?**

**COMPLETE.  
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"Good luck, Girl Next Door," says Justinia, my stylist.

Girl Next Door is the persona they've chosen for me. Katniss was the Girl on Fire, the District Twelve girl last year was the Little Orphan Girl. Now me. It's a nice way of calling me ordinary.

The opening in the plastic tube slides shut behind me, muffling Justinia's goodbyes. She's sweet, despite the fearsome, heavy piercings that have dragged her earlobes halfway to her shoulders, but she couldn't help me much. My hair was short when I was reaped, too short to do anything with except add some highlights. I'm the only natural blonde this year. That will get me sponsors, she tells me.

Sponsors aren't on my mind right now. The many, many ways I could potentially die in the next two minutes are.

The bottom of the tube is rising. My heart is pumping furiously, as if a fist were mashing it flat with every beat.

In seconds, I'll pop out of the top into who-knows-what hellscape, and I'll have to make the most important decision of my entire life.

Head towards, or away from, the Cornucopia.

I've been agonizing. If you run, you survive the first day, almost always. Your competition is cut down by a third, maybe even half. The worst work, the culling of the weak, is done for you. And one in twelve sounds like so, so much better odds than one in twenty-four.

But I watch this show every year. I know you need supplies. I've watched people die of thirst, of cold, heat, the shock of exposure. I've watched what happens to tributes who have nothing when they're hunted down by Careers with bows and arrows, spears, tridents.

The deaths at Cornucopia usually aren't so bad. They're quick. If you're going to die in the Games, the first day is the day to do it. No torture, usually. No Gamemaker fires, no mutt bites.

When I pop out, I'll have sixty seconds to assess the landscape, the available weapons, the supplies, decide which direction to run, and who to take with me.

All I can see in my mind's eye is the year the tributes were faced with the pile of mace sticks, and only mace sticks. The full sixty seconds of dawning horror on their faces, the three weeks of agony that followed. That year stuck with me.

Please, please let this at least be an ordinary year, a year they didn't put much work into. A pile of random supplies, a varied, mostly natural landscape.

If they think too hard, they come up with stuff like acid quicksand. Slobbering mutants, flowers that shoot tumor-growing darts.

I should go for the Cornucopia. So much better to be killed by the players than the Gamemakers.

If it's a natural landscape, what kind of natural will it be? There's usually a theme. Forest, ice, desert, water, fantasyland. If it's snow you can run away from the Cornucopia, knowing there's a water source. One year it was all artificial, brightly colored blocks, like a child's playroom. One year it was a lava world. Anything but that.

Whoosh. This is it. Terror pours over me along with the rush of cool air, the kind of terror a little twelve, not a grown-up eighteen-year-old, should feel.

I'm in the Arena.

Oh, no. They've worked on this one.

Though it's the middle of the day, the sky is a deep, dark violet. No stars. An opaque, blanket-like film stretches over the whole arena, and I know instinctively that this cover will not lift. That will be one of our themes this year: permanent night.

If I don't win, I've seen the sun for the last time.

We're on a well-lit dais of flat concrete, with a six-foot drop behind us. The Cornucopia glows in the center, lit by a circle of high-powered lamps like the ones in real sports stadiums. I squint into its belly, and, oh, no, it's all one thing. That can't be good.

My vision clears.

The center of the Cornucopia is filled with stacks and stacks of water bottles.

At least it's not maces.

That's it. Fifteen seconds gone, and the decision is made. I'll have to go in. We'll all have to. You can't even make an attempt at winning without water.

My heart is thrashing around in the pit of my stomach.

I'm going to fight at Cornucopia.

I can do it. I'm not the weakest. Not by half.

Forty-five seconds remain.

Other than water, supplies are arranged strategically around the Cornucopia. Furthest out, closest to us, is a thin circle of weapons.

The weapons are themed. They all look old, like caveman old. Spears, clubs, atlatls. Flint knives. A bow and arrow. No swords, no tridents, no polished metal.

Closest to me are a primitive club and a leather-bound pack of crude blades. A wooden shield.

A second circle, closer in: Camping supplies. Modern. Food, tents, first-aid kits. These will be the real life-savers.

Thirty seconds left.

I try to look out further into the dark purple landscape, but the combination of the distant darkness and the bright lights ahead of me make it impossible. I read confusion and hesitation in the eyes of the other tributes. They can't see what's out there, either.

Twenty seconds left to examine my competition.

To my right, ten yards away, the girl from Five. Loma. Reed-boned, with clear, darting eyes and her mouth pinched shut as she examines her predicament. She won't hurt me today. She's a thinker, not a fighter.

To my left… damn it.

Jax. The District One Career boy. Layers of heavy muscle, a face like a classical statue, curly brown hair that made the Capitol girls love him. He's the one to beat this year.

But Jax isn't looking at me. He's looking to his own left, where the District Two girl stands: Jewel, a hideous ogre with biceps as big as his own. They've placed a spear unfairly close to her platform.

Though they are both Careers, I know Jax and Jewel hate each other. They won't be allies.

I look for my potential allies, and for the most important person here, who I need to team up with but who can't be called an ally, really.

I find my friends first. A few down from me: Soren, my partner from District Twelve. I like him, though I didn't know him before the reaping. Quiet and practical, always calm. A little grim. Straight black hair, smooth, caramel-colored skin.

We've talked a little, and I don't know what to make of him. I can't even tell if he's scared. But he's a District Twelve like me. We're good people. I'll be his ally if he'll let me.

Almost on the other side of the circle, next to each other, are the boy and girl from Six. Pec and Dista. Brother and sister, one year apart, matching dark brown skin, matching short noses and dreadlocks. Like me, they scored sevens in the training sessions. They, like me and Soren, are among the few non-Careers who stand a chance of surviving the first day. Most of the others scored five or below.

The four of us would make natural allies, if I didn't have my handicap.

And there he is: My handicap. My ticket out of here. He's between two Careers.

Mika. The male twelve-year-old from District Eleven. Small for his age, in body and mind. Pale, freckled, cute. Helpless – he scored a two.

I held his hand afterwards while he cried about it. He's so scared. His district partner, a seventeen-year-old bitch named Chetty, abandoned him on the first training day, and I've befriended him.

Decided to protect him.

It's a strategy. Gain favor from the Capitol sponsors by becoming the protector of the weakest of the bunch. My mentor, Katniss, even agreed to it. The babysitting thing fits with my wholesome "Girl Next Door" image.

But that's not the only reason I'm going to do it. I want to. I want to have someone other than myself to be responsible for, so I can justify the horrible crimes I'm about to commit – attempt to commit – on grounds other than total selfishness.

Mika is rattling in his circle. Terrified. He's been terrified since the reaping. I told him beforehand to stay still and wait for me. If I ran, to follow me.

His big gray eyes seek me out. I nod. _Yes, I'm on your side. You're not alone._

I can help him. I'm the only one who will try.

I turn from him and focus on the club, the weapon nearest me.

The gong sounds.


	2. Cornucopia

I run, angling to my right, away from the big Career, Jax. I don't have time to see who he's coming after, me or Jewel, because I immediately almost slam into smart little Loma.

We're staring each other down, five feet from the club. Her eyes dart to it. She wants it, but I want it too, and I'm bigger than she is. I shove her a little.

She gives me a bitter flash of teeth before darting away. She's still heading towards the Cornucopia, but in a wide circle, trying to avoid the pairs of fighting tributes that have already formed.

Just like that, no bloodshed, I get my first weapon. It's heavy. Deadly. Adrenaline makes me want to swing it, to bash one of these kids' teeth in. Then I remember the mace year, the horror of broken faces, and I pause.

I look for Mika. He hasn't moved from his circle. Still shaking. He's watching me.

But when someone calls my name, "Cora!" it's not Mika. It's Soren. My district partner.

I turn, and it saves my life. One of the others, the boy from Eight, is bearing down on me with a short spear-like weapon he's using as a sword.

He swings, but he's petrified as the rest of us, he's shorter than me, and his aim is off. He only grazes my chest. I swing back, wildly, weakly. My club is well-designed. It's so heavy on the end that any contact is painful, and I get lucky – I hit his fingers, the ones holding his weapon. I feel them crush under my blow.

He grabs his hand, hisses, and I pull the club over my head and slam it down on his. _Thud._ I don't think he's dead, but he's down.

I've won my first fight. I didn't falter like I thought I would. I'm not a failure, an immediate Hunger Games casualty.

I should be traumatized, but a smile splits my face.

I grab the shield – it will be good for holding other supplies – and sprint for the Cornucopia. Can't do anything about Soren or Mika yet.

Bam!

Oh god, I'm down! Is this it, was that as far as I got? Jax's huge, angry face flashes in front of me, there's a crushing weight on my legs, then it's mercifully gone.

Jax and Jewel are fighting, and they've barreled into me. I wasn't the target. But they're inches from me now, and I can't move with the wind knocked out of me.

Also, after a moment, I am transfixed by their fight. They are two giants, equally matched, pounding each other with blows I know would knock my head off if they landed on me. Bang, bang, their mallet fists pummel their mountainous bodies.

Jewel is down now, under Jax, growling in frustration. Jax has gotten a flint knife. As I struggle, dizzy, to my feet, he pounds it into Jewel's thick neck, gives one mighty yank to the side.

Jewel's ogre-like head rolls to a stop at my feet.

Jax looks at me. He's mad. Breathing hard.

_Run_, my mind says.

I do, with an embarrassing shriek, and I just manage to evade Jax's grasping hand. One good thing about Jax, he's not a runner. Too big.

Suddenly I've reached the inner circle, the one with camping supplies, and I have to make a decision: Grab something now, and risk Jax getting me, or run straight to the water? I jump over a devastatingly tempting set of camping gear, hoping that if I run for the water Jax will find someone else to kill by the time he regains his feet.

Water. I'm there. I haul four large bottles out and clumsily stack them on my shield, along with my club. Wait. Am I really the first here? Unbelievable, but yes, I am. Good, I'm fast.

That also means that right at this second I am literally everyone's target.

I try to lift the shield and run.

Oh, crap. Water is heavy. Especially in two-liter bottles.

And Loma has materialized in front of me with a knife.

Two more kids are coming. One is a tall Career, a girl with fake eyelashes – Glory is her name, I remember pointlessly.

A terrified scream. "Cora!"

That's Mika's voice. I can't look for him, Loma has me backed against the rim of the Cornucopia. I don't drop my shield, my silly platter of life-giving supplies. I grip it tighter, with no plan but to hang on.

As I stare at Loma, Glory kills one of the other kids on her way towards us. She uses an atlatl to do it. Not correctly. An atlatl is for throwing stuff, but she just uses the whole device to stab a kid crudely in the back of the head.

Loma turns, gauges the situation, lets me go. I realize she never intended to stab me. Just to slow me down, to use me as a shield against the others while she gathers water in a satchel she's picked up. A shield against Glory.

Fumbling, stupid, I set my shield on the ground and lift two bottles of water off it.

"Hey, beautiful," Glory says with a sickly sweet smile, fluttering her long eyelashes. "Those for me?"

"Yeah," I say. "Catch."

I hurl them at her.

She's not stupid enough to try to catch them, but the weapon in her hands and our short distance make it impossible to avoid both of them. The water bottles are large and sturdy; one clonks her good just above the eye, snapping her head back soundly.

I grab what I can, just one water bottle and my club, and I fly for Mika.

He's not in his circle! Where…?

Crack!

My head!

Glory has thrown her atlatl at my back. The whole thing. She's really not very bright. It was only a glancing blow, the shape of the weapon is so awkward. I turn and find Glory now grappling over the water bottles with a Career. I've been granted another reprieve.

Time to focus on Mika.

There, beyond the dais. He has been forced to jump. He's being chased by another twelve-year-old, one who must have seen him as an easy target. They are darting shadows in the dark. The other twelve, the aggressor, has a weapon. Mika is propelled by sheer panic, and he's sobbing as he runs.

I come for him.

I have to jump over a bloody body on the way, the girl from District Ten, whose head is now half-smashed in, though I can see she's still breathing. She flinches as I clear her. My chest tightens at the thought of her pain. That could have been me, five or six times, just now.

After the bad luck of losing most of my water at the horn, I get one blessing: directly between me and Mika is a medium-sized backpack. Backpacks are the best. They almost always have a nice range of good stuff, stuff you wouldn't think of. I give it three hard kicks as I run, and it falls off the edge of the dais. I jump after it.

The other twelve-year-old has caught Mika in a pathetic, babyish headlock. He's got a tricky angle for his weapon, an arrow, and he can't quite get it into Mika's neck.

I easily remove the other boy, freeing Mika. I take his arrow, fling him back.

I remember to say something out loud, so my fans understand the intended narrative. "You stay away from this boy," I say. "He's under my protection."

Mika shivers beside me, tiny, frail.

The other little boy stares at me, and it occurs to me that I could kill him now. Kill this child, who is obviously a threat, get it over with. It would be good practice for later.

The boy is ugly enough to kill. Stocky and pig-faced. A whiner.

Gump is his name. No one likes him.

But now that I'm not in immediate life-or-death danger, I lose my nerve. I wave the arrow at Gump threateningly and just let him run away. He trots his chubby butt off into the dark, leaving me and Mika alone.

I put the pack on Mika, grab our water and my weapon, and shove him forward.

Phase One couldn't have gone better, really. I survived Cornucopia. So did Mika. We have a day's worth of water, a weapon, and a backpack. People are dying behind us, improving our odds.

With the screams of the others at our backs, Mika and I hurry off into the violet landscape to see what the Gamemakers have prepared for us.


	3. Think of Me As Your Babysitter

At first we can't see much, blinded as we are by the bright dais lights. There's shaggy grass beneath our feet, grass that could hide snakes and insects. It's not time to worry about that yet, though. We've got nice long leather boots as part of our uniforms.

We reach a tree line and plunge in, instantly halving our speed. Mika's sobs have quieted. He stumbles beside me in silence, a little automaton following my orders. This way, this way.

Like I know where I'm going.

After a couple minutes I realize it's not as dark as I had initially thought. The sky has a rosy purple glow. Once your eyes adjust to it, you can see pretty well, well enough to walk without your arms out in front of you.

I'm not surprised when after two miles or so, we haven't encountered water. The water bottles at Cornucopia won't really be the only source – even the Capitol hates watching us die of thirst – but the remaining sources will be difficult and weird. Maybe we'll have to drink water from an animal or cross a scary bridge to get at it.

The trees don't seem sinister. They're large, with long needles and hairy bark. Great for hiding. The needles carpet the forest floor and I wonder what they're good for. Fire? Eating? They'll be useful somehow.

When we reach the far edge of the forest, I grab a couple handfuls and stuff them in my and Mika's pockets.

"Are we stopping?" Mike asks hopefully. His cheeks are still shiny with tears.

"One more mile," I say. "Then we'll open up that backpack and see what presents we got!"

Thankfully, temperature isn't a problem yet. From the feel and weight of the backpack, I'm guessing it doesn't hold a blanket.

Whatever they've done to the sky, it's made the landscape feel small and warm.

We are in a field of tall grass now. I'm among the taller tributes, and it reaches my shoulders. It's above Mika's head. Perfect for hiding, later on.

But what's hiding in it?

There's a rustle a couple hundred feet to our left.

I look. The grass is parting. Something is coming towards us. An animal. A mutt.

Mika hears it and grabs onto me. His little hands are so weak, it's no effort at all to pry them off.

"Hold this," I say, handing him the water. I need both hands to work my club. "And go! Go forward!"

He leads the way, loudly shoving the grass apart, while I walk backwards behind him with my club pointed at our pursuer.

Again, images of all the horrible mutts the Capitol has ever conjured up flash before my eyes. Sea monsters. Tentacled raccoons that suck chunks off your skin. Hundred-toothed bears. Tracker jackers.

The grass parts. I raise my club.

It's Gump. The chubby twelve-year-old.

"You again?" I say. "Look, you're pushing your luck, kid."

He hurls a rock at my head. Misses.

Hatred burns on his face, but there's determination there too. I've seen this before in the Games. Fixation on a target, even when it's stupid. The desperation to make a kill, the idiotic stalking and hunting from kids who should be hiding. Gump's stupid face tells me he won't let us go. Also, he's pulling out another rock.

I remember that I've fought several times today and won. That I'm one of the oldest, that I have muscles and this kid doesn't.

I punch Gump in the face. Take his bag of rocks.

He tries to tackle me, and jeez, he would be a biter, wouldn't he? And a scratcher.

I get my knuckles in his eyes, and he shrieks like the little girl he is. "No fair!" he squeals, a sob in his voice. "No fair!"

He rolls away, whimpering theatrically, crawling on his stomach like a dog. This is his strategy, then? The weakling act? He's not as good at it as Johanna Mason was. All this ugly groveling will lose him sponsors.

Still, I can't kill him. The timing's off. My adrenaline rush is gone.

"Cora, I want to go," Mika says after I've stood over Gump a while, debating. "Please."

I can't leave Gump to follow us. I make a decision. It's surprisingly easy. I do it with the detachment of a doctor deciding to amputate.

I spin Gump's bag of rocks while he grovels, watching me in horror. I snap it, with force, over his knee.

Crack. Again, that same leg, this time on the foot. He's trying to get away now, but I get him one more time.

With at least one broken bone in his leg, he won't be following us. One of the others will pick him off.

We leave Gump in a sobbing pile and make it through the grass layer.

I finally let Mika stop in a rocky outcropping, about a hundred yards from a series of cliffs that lead down to a beach, marking the edge of this side of the arena. I don't know which side it is. North? South? There's no sun. This seems like a short distance to have already reached the arena edge, and I realize we might be on an island.

Nestled between a large rock and a scraggly bush, I peel the backpack off Mika and settle down to see what we've got.

A first-aid kit! Yes! We'll need it for sure, you always get injured. And it has a tiny pair of scissors in it, which could be useful for all kinds of stuff.

Metal straws. I don't know what they're for. I lay them aside.

Mika is watching me with wide eyes. He's shivering again.

"You okay?" I ask.

"How come you're helping me?"

Sigh. "Because you're cute?" I offer.

He doesn't look satisfied.

"Because you're the youngest, and the littlest, and I didn't want to watch you die out there, okay?" I say. Though it's true, my voice rings false. I'm no better at scripted readings for sponsors than Katniss was.

"Think of me as your babysitter."

He nods obediently, still looking doubtful.

I continue going through our pack.

"Yes!"

I was wrong, there IS a blanket! A thin metallic one, folded tightly into a palm-sized pack. Just the one, and it will be a bitch to get back into any shape once it's unfolded, but a blanket! We won't have to make a fire tonight.

A lighter, and a vial of extra lighter fluid. Perfect. Weapons, and light in this world of permanent night.

A set of metal camping dishes, a spoon. Not too useful, but hey.

Last: a ball of twine. An unbelievable gift, a million uses.

Hope is pumping through me, a better energizer than adrenaline. There's no food, but you don't really need food at first. We have enough to survive the first seventy-two hours. The critical period. After that, anybody can win.

"We're really doing great, Mika," I say. "Look at all this!"

He tries to smile but can't. Poor kid.

"Come on," I say. "We survived Cornucopia. Aren't you happy about that? Your mom's watching right now. I bet she's happy."

"But the others didn't survive," he squeaks out. "Iggy from Ten. They smashed her head in with a stick. She was begging. And Jason from Eight. You knocked him down, and Gump killed him. He stuck that arrow in his neck. I watched. And Glory stabbed Nap from Eight. Her brains came out the back of her. Like eggs. Then Gump came for me."

He's crying again.

I realize that I should have told Mika to close his eyes while he waited for me at Cornucopia. He's too sensitive for all this. If he survives… and he shouldn't, because eventually even I will have to end our alliance and abandon him… he'll be a bundle of raw, traumatized nerves for the rest of his life.

"And I didn't do anything," he says. "You did it all."

"You carried the pack…" I begin, but it's clear from his face he doesn't need words right now.

I pull him into a hug.

His little body is hot, and we are immediately stuck together with sweat, but I don't let go until he's sobbed out some of his tension. He'll need a nap after this. Sweet little guy. He's just a baby.

The cannon starts going off. "Count!" I say.

There were two groups of Careers this year, which is awesome. It means they might kill each other. I'm hoping for a high death toll at Cornucopia. One year it was fourteen. Please, let it be fourteen.

We count, and the cannon stops at nine.

Nine dead.

Fifteen to go.

My odds are one in fifteen. Better than one in twenty-four.

Of course, that's not really how it works. The odds are better for the Careers. But I'm feeling good. I've done so well. Stuck to the strategy Katniss and I planned. Got Mika. Got my supplies. Outlasted a couple confrontations, even brief encounters with Jax and Glory.

"Thank you for saving me," Mika says. Then he hiccups.

I giggle at him. He's so cute. He'll get us a million sponsors.

Hic!

"They'll find us if I keep hiccupping!" he moans.

"We'll hear them coming," I say. "I'll set up an alarm. You lie down. Sip the water. Little sips, that has to last us!"

He watches while I unravel the twine at ankle height around our small haven, in a circle about a hundred feet in diameter. One end of the twine I attach to the mess kit, the metal dishes and spoon, and then I hang them from a bush. Now someone coming at us will hopefully trip the twine, rattle the dishes, and wake us.

Where we'll run after that, I don't know.

By the time I'm done, Mika is already asleep, exhausted by trauma and our run through the woods. I unfold the blanket and use it to cover both of us.

I consider staying awake to keep watch, but that only works if your partner can stay up to keep watch too. I'm not going to wake Mika to take over later. We'll just have to risk it.

I drink a little of the water to calm my stomach.

I absorb what's happened to me. I'm in the Hunger Games. The horrors I've watched my whole life, I'm in them. And I'm doing well. I have no guilt over Jason or Gump, the way I thought I would.

The anthem plays, and I note the faces in the air.

Jewel, the giant ogre, beheaded by Jax. Babel, the boy from three, who I know had planned to join Jewel's gang of Careers. Al, crafty Loma's district partner. I brace myself because District Six is coming, and… yes. Dista is among the dead.

That's one potential ally down. And her brother Pec will be a mess now, maybe too messed up to be any help. It really was disgusting when the pair was reaped together. No way it was a coincidence.

Their parents were screaming at the reaping, their mom had to be beaten down…

Both dead from Eight.

Sarah-May, Gump's district partner, dead.

Both from Ten.

That's all.

"Chetty's still alive," says Mika. The anthem must have woken him.

"Too bad," I say.

Chetty, his district partner, who has ignored him since the reaping. Who has allied with Jax's Career gang. Who is all bones and aloof scowls. Bitch.

"She's not so bad," says Mika. "I know her from school."

"I'd prefer to take my chances with Soren," I say. Soren. My partner. I bet he would help us, if we could find him. Should have tried to make the alliance official before the Games started. Tomorrow we'll begin the search.

With Mika as my teddy bear, I quickly fall asleep.


	4. The Blue Snake

When I wake up, Mika isn't breathing.

I think that's what woke me, the silence where his steady, deep breaths had been.

My eyes are completely used to the dim, violet light now, and I can see that his lips are discolored. He flops over when I shake him.

How long has he been like this?

"Mika!" I whisper frantically. "Mika! Don't die! Don't be dead!"

What could it be? He was fine, FINE! I took care of him! There were no injuries, he would have told me, couldn't have hidden them. If one of the others shot him in the night, I'd have woken up, they'd have shot me too…

I roll him on his back. He's cold. Not dead, though. There's a pulse. There's time. Seconds. Seconds before he'll be brain damaged, then dead, and I'll be alone without him.

Though I don't need him to survive really, he's just a strategy, the thought of losing him this way makes me panic. And Panem is watching. His parents are watching. Mine too. I have to save him.

"Wake up!" I bang on his chest. I put my mouth to his, force air down his throat twice, return to his chest. A wiggle under my fingers makes me jump back.

There's something under his shirt.

As I watch, a tiny, dark blue snake slides out from under his collar and vanishes under the big rock we slept under.

Snake bite. Where was he bitten? Can I suck out the venom?

It's been at least a full minute now since he breathed.

I'm about to take his shirt off to search for the bite wound when his whole body jolts, like he's being electrocuted. I start back.

He gasps, gags, goes still. Opens his eyes.

Oh, no.

His eyes.

All wrong. The whites are red. And not like pink-eye red, but solid, pool-of-blood, artificial red. The gray of his irises is gone, turned black. Demon eyes.

He blinks at me, blinks those awful, animal eyes from his adorable baby face.

"Cora?" he says, and he almost sounds like himself. "What happened?"

I hesitate.

He jumps, _leaps_ to his feet, and I leap to mine. "I said, what. Happened." His little kid voice is different, more confident. Harsh. There's a threat in it.

Where are my weapons? Behind him, we slept with them as our pillows.

"Don't panic," I say slowly, "But you've been bitten by a snake. There's something wrong with you."

"Something like what." No question mark in his voice. No fear. He's staring at me as if seeing me for the first time.

"Your eyes changed color. And you're acting funny."

He steps towards me, and I rear back. He raises his eyebrows.

"Stay right where you are," I say. "No sudden moves."

His lips pull back from his teeth. He doesn't look human. "Calm down, Cora. It's just me," he says, with a fake laugh. "Little Mika. Helpless Mika. Hold me, Cora, I'm scared."

I'm trying to think what to do, and nothing comes to mind. What kind of snake venom could do this? Change his personality? Is Mika a mutt now? Is this a change to his DNA, a permanent one? Am I going to have to kill him? Or can I wait this out? Tie him up, maybe, with the twine…

"Come here," he says. "I'm not going to hurt you, Cora. You took care of me. I want a hug." He's still grinning. "You did a good job. I feel great. I'm not scared anymore. I feel… as good as I ever felt."

It's not him talking. I know what Mika sounds like, and this isn't it. Mika doesn't move like this, either, with this scary confidence.

I take my eyes off him for a second, just a second, looking for my club, and he strikes.

Thankfully, whatever else the venom did to him, it turns out it didn't give him any kind of enhanced strength. His teeth are gnashing, his limbs flying wildly as he attacks me, but he is simply too weak to really damage me.

I pin him, wrap him up with his back to my chest. He starts laying down bites on my arms, real, nasty bites. And he's making noises. Animal yowls.

"Shut up!" I hiss. "Shut up, Mika, you'll attract the others!"

But he's out of his mind, way beyond caring.

As I'm trying to free an arm to reach for the twine, he gets his teeth into my forearm, deep in, and I am unable to hold back a scream. I hurl him to the ground and try to assess the damage.

It's serious. A real wound, a chunk of my arm gone. This could be infected in a day, kill me in two. Little Mika may have just killed me. And besides that, oh, it hurts. I can't believe it. He ripped the skin away, RIPPED it with a yank of his head. Didn't even bite it off cleanly. Blood is everywhere.

He's back on me now, and all I can do is beat him away. The twine. I need to bind him.

Hell, I may need to kill him, if this keeps up.

He's too small to restrain me. The twine is in my hands now – the hand on the injured arm is shaking.

I flip Mika on his stomach, pin his arms with my knees, start wrapping him up. Ignore the fountain of blood gushing down my arm. I have no plan, and waste a lot of time rewrapping the same area accidentally, but the ball of twine is long enough to make up for my incompetence.

Finally, his arms are attached to his chest. I'm able to move to his legs. I get kicked in the mouth for my trouble, and I can feel that he has loosened a tooth. My affection for him is wearing out quickly.

There, he's down. Still screeching, but down. Maybe if the others hear him, they'll think he's being killed by something awful and avoid him.

I leave him on the ground while I open the first aid kit and try to bandage my arm. It's hard, so hard, to bind a forearm wound yourself. I do a terrible job, wasting almost the whole bandage roll before I'm able to stanch the bleeding.

I'm trying to think what to do when a new sound joins Mika's complaints. The rattle of the mess kit. My alarm.

I spin and see Zink, the fairy-like girl from District Three. She had been sneaking up on Mika with a stone axe, but now she realizes she's tripped an alarm, and she has frozen. I don't hesitate. I run at her, swing my club at her face with my uninjured left hand.

The club connects at the exact moment I hear Soren's voice crying, "Allies! Cora, NO!"

Zink's face is knocked an inch to one side. Just her face, not her head. She drops like a rock. Curls at my feet, gasping, sobbing, raising her hands to catch all the blood.

Soren runs from behind another rock and kneels beside her. His clean, handsome profile is twisted in fury.

"Damn it, Cora," he spits. "She was on our side. She was helping me. She would have helped you. Why would you…?"

He doesn't finish. He knows it's stupid, that I didn't know she was his ally, couldn't have known. If Zink wanted to be allies she should have said something while I came at her.

"Damn it," Soren repeats. "Guys. Guys, it's over. Zink's out. We've got to talk. Come on."

Two more faces appear in the gloom. One is Pec, the boy who lost his sister yesterday. He looks awful, hollow-eyed and already thinner. The other…

"Loma?" I say, incredulous. "Soren, you're allies with…?"

Loma smirks. "What's wrong, Blondie? Why wouldn't he be?"

Other than our encounter yesterday, I can't say exactly why I don't like Loma. I feel like she'll stab you in the back if you turn around. Her eyes are always darting. She's waiting for a chance to get you.

I'm shocked Soren agreed to ally with her. He's more suspicious than I am.

I hate the idea of Loma being my ally - knowing where I'm sleeping, knowing about my supplies, my wonderful lighter, my ball of twine.

Suddenly I'm comforted. The scissors from the first-aid kit are still in my pocket, from when I cut the twine last night. They'll be my secret from her, from all of them, just in case.

We surround Zink and watch her writhe, while I quietly explain the situation with Mika. Pec, disturbed by the sight of Zink – which I realize must remind him of his dead sister – takes up the job of silencing Mika. I watch to make sure he's only gagging, not killing, him.

In a minute, it's clear that the injury I've inflicted on Zink isn't one she's going to be able to recover from.

Her face is just broken. Cheek, eye socket, upper teeth. It won't kill her, but she won't be able to function for the remainder of the Games. She won't be able to see, to walk, to eat. She's suffering. Blood is rushing in my ears now at the thought of her pain. I want it to end.

We gather a few feet from her, huddled in the shadow of a giant rock.

At first we can't agree to kill her, just because the hovercraft could give away our location. But Zink's pained keening quickly overcomes us.

"I'll do it," says Loma. She's holding Zink's axe. "I'll make it quick."

"It's my fault," I say. "I should do it." But will my sponsors still think of me as the girl next door if they watch me take Zink's head off? A terrible, mercenary thought to have while she's lying there suffering. I haven't even needed sponsors so far, I shouldn't be so obsessed with them. But later they could become the difference between life and death.

Also, I wouldn't do a good job of it. Not with my injured right arm.

Soren does it, it in the end. He's picked because he's the strongest of the bunch, the one most likely to be able to do it in one blow. I pack, to be ready to travel as soon as it's over. Loma and I each hold one of Zink's hands. She's blind, so she doesn't see the axe coming, and it's quick.

I wonder who her family will blame: Me or Soren?

Zink's cannon rattles us.

"So," says Loma brightly, while we wait for the hovercraft to lift Zink away. "We came here for an extra ally, but now we're about in the same place we were before. Well, worse. Now we've got a crazy kid and we've given away our location. Should we take care of Mika while we're at it?"

Mika thrashes in Pec's arms at the sound of his name.

I've recovered my club. "Absolutely not," I say.

"He's going to slow us down," Soren says.

"The venom will wear off," I say. "I'm not leaving him, and you're not killing him, so shut up about it."

"We all die eventually," says Loma. "All but one of us. What's your problem? Look at him, he's going to get us all killed."

Mika's eyes are still that frightening red and black.

"Maybe being allies isn't a good idea," I say. "I'm sorry about Zink, but maybe you all should move on. I can't come without him. I promised to take care of him."

Soren sighs. Loma and Pec look at each other.

"Can he at least walk?" asks Pec.

"Yes," I say immediately. "The venom made him feel strong. He can walk. We just can't free his arms, or let him open his mouth. It won't last long."

How do I know? I don't. I'm hoping.

Mika glares at us over his brand new gag, but he allows us to free his legs.

"We should head back to the forest," says Soren. "There are two groups of Careers scanning the perimeter, and they'll work their way inward. More places to hide in the forest than out here. We don't want to get trapped in the grass field."

I'm about to agree when another cannon goes off, pounding through my bones with its volume.

We all freeze and wait. Wait for the hovercraft. Where will it appear?

A hundred yards from us, is where. Gump's mutilated body is dragged into the air.

The Careers have found us.

"Scatter!" says Loma. "Run! Meet at the black and white tree!"

"The black and white tree? What?" I ask, but the group is already scattering, and a gang of three Careers, armed up like Neanderthal warlords, have taken their place.

I shove Mika in the direction I saw Soren run – he cooperates, thank goodness – and flee after them.


	5. The Black and White Tree

Not counting a thrown spear that missed, the Careers haven't chased me. It's Pec they've decided to go after. He's the most able-bodied of our bunch, the one the Careers need to get first. They're chasing him away, and I'm following Soren, shoving Mika as hard as I dare to keep him going in the right direction.

I dare pretty hard. I'm mad at Mika. My arm is killing me. And my head hurts. I haven't had water yet today.

I stop and pull my bottle out of the pack, drink some, glare at Mika. He's waiting for a chance to attack me.

He hasn't had any water today, either. He isn't showing symptoms of thirst, but that could be a side effect of the venom. He could be completely dehydrated and not aware of it. Should I remove the gag, let him drink?

I will once we're with the others, I decide. I return the bottle to the pack and push Mika on, following the thin path Soren has left through the tall grass. The Careers will find this path later, but hopefully we'll be well into the woods by then, where it will be easier to cover our tracks.

Soren meets us at the forest edge, popping out from behind a thick trunk. We each take one of Mika's arms and guide him on toward, apparently, the "black and white" tree.

"We found it this morning," Soren explains. His voice is steady, calm, as always. You would think he hadn't just mercy-killed a little girl, then run for his life. "An apple tree in the middle of the woods, a huge one. Half the apples are white, half are black."

"Sounds like a test," I say. "One color will be good for you, and the other one poisonous."

"That's what we thought," he says. "But Jewel's group… they're Moses' group now, actually, since Jewel's dead… showed up, and we had to run. That was about an hour before we found you."

Neither one of us needs to say what a wonderful find such a tree is, if we can figure out which color is which. A source of food and water and poison. Incredible.

It's maybe forty-five minutes before we find the tree, though it's hard to measure time in the gloom. I realize I don't know how long Mika and I slept before he was bitten by the snake. Might have been a couple hours or ten.

I ask Soren, and he says we're well into Day Two.

That explains why the Gamemakers sicced the snake on us. We were getting boring.

Still, maybe the rest of today will be calm. Two dead already. Pec being hunted down. Mika infected with personality-altering venom. Me wounded. Surely that's enough for a single day.

The tree is beautiful. The black and white apples aren't spread over half the tree each, as I'd pictured, but mixed up in a cute polka-dot way. It's a fairy tale tree.

Pec does not appear. But there's been no cannon. After an hour of sitting (we rebound Mika's legs, and he accepted water with a hate-filled grimace before we replaced his gag), we're all feeling the creeping second-day hunger, and we decide to test the tree.

"The most obvious would be, the black apples are poison, the white ones food," says Loma.

"So we have to assume the opposite," says Soren.

We all agree. But then we all hesitate for the same reason. The Gamemakers knew we would think that way. So it might be the opposite of _that_. How far are we going to second guess ourselves?

"It doesn't matter," says Loma. "We're not going to eat enough at first to kill us anyway. Just a little on the tip of the tongue. Just enough to know."

She plucks a black apple. It looks delicious, with tight skin that says it's bursting with rich juice.

I'm suddenly dying of hunger.

"We should try it on Mika," she says. "We can afford to lose him. And he's biting everything in sight anyway."

"Shut up," I say. "I'll do it."

She shrugs. "Whatever." She hands me the apple with a look that says, "Hey, if it's what you want…"

I realize that she suggested Mika because she knew I would volunteer to get him out of it. She managed to do it so fast, so well, that she and Soren were never even candidates to test for poison.

She's clever. I hate her.

Part of me wonders why Soren doesn't speak up for me, but I know he's only my ally, not my friend, not today. I haven't even been a good ally – I've slowed him down with Mika and killed one of his group.

I try to turn my mind from Zink, so I don't get sick even before I test for poison.

We have all learned in training, and from watching the Games, how to test for poison. A tiny piece of whatever it is, set fifteen minutes on the tip of the tongue. Then fifteen minutes under the tongue. Then a tiny bit swallowed, and wait for an hour.

If nothing happens, you're fine. If there's numbness or sickness, don't eat any more. Easy.

I tear a little sliver off the black apple.

The meat of the fruit, I'm surprised to see, is white, just like an ordinary apple. The sliver I'm going to test has both the white meat and the black skin on it. Just a touch, a centimeter long, a millimeter wide.

I stick out my tongue, give the others a thumbs up, and place the tiny bit on my tongue.

For thirty seconds, I'm fine.

Then, instantly and totally, I'm not.

You're supposed to know it's poison because of burning or numbness on the tip of your tongue. But my tongue has started to swell. It's happening so fast, I can feel the capillaries stretching as they fill with blood, fast as air pumping into a balloon.

I spit out the apple piece, scratch at the place it sat on my tongue with my fingers, wipe the tongue on my sleeve, yell for water. But by the time Soren has gotten the cap off my water bottle, my tongue has swollen so much it fills my mouth, and it's sticking out, and I can't breathe.

God, no. I can't die like this. With a horrible giant sea slug for a tongue, poking out of my face like an obscene joke. I'm flailing – Soren is pouring water on my face, trying to clean my tongue, but it's air I need, air!

I claw at my backpack. "First aid kit!" I try to say, but I can't speak. My teeth are cutting into my tongue.

Soren is backing off. He's horrified. Even Mika has stilled. Only Loma gets it, but the first-aid kit is in an awkward spot in the backpack, and in her hurry, she just dumps the whole thing out.

"What are…?" She has found the metal straws and is staring at them in wonder.

I try to scream in the back of my throat. These are the last seconds of my life. I do not care about the metal straws.

Stars are before me. I can't breathe.

I realize with horror that as I gnash about for air, I am going to bite off my own tongue before I die.

"Hold her down!" cries Loma, and Soren is on top of me.

Loma has gotten ahold of Gump's arrow, she's frantically wiping it on her shirt. Why would you wipe it before killing me with it? I desperately think.

Two mercy killings in one day. Our group is doing terrible.

I can't believe this is how it's going to end for me. Tears leak uncontrollably out of my eyes. I shake my head, but I don't know what I'm saying no to. I do want this nightmare to end.

I'm browning out. Blood is flowing freely from my mouth. I've dislodged the bandage on my arm, and blood is flowing from there too.

Loma leans over me, putting the arrow to my throat, and I lose consciousness.


	6. Poison and Medicine

I dream my reaping.

My last one. I'm eighteen, this is it. If Effie Trinket doesn't call my name, I'm safe. Every year I stand here and shiver, even though the odds are in my favor. Father's a merchant. I've never had to take out tesserae. My name is only in that ball seven times.

I do have one factor against me: A pact I have made with my best friend, Emmaline, who is not rich, who _has_ had to take out tesserae. Her name is in the ball twenty-eight times.

She's so poor, she didn't even have something nice to wear for reaping. She's in her ordinary, worn shirt and pants. Her face is sooty, her hair in a simple braid, just like always. Another faceless Seam kid, to anyone but me and her family.

We were twelve, it was right before our first reaping, and she swore to me that if I were chosen, she would volunteer for me. I swore right back. And I meant it. I would volunteer for her. I have no brothers and sisters, she's the only person in the world I would do it for.

My parents don't know about the pact. They would be horrified. I'm their only child. Emmaline has two brothers and sisters who her parents can cling to if she's chosen. My parents would have no one.

Katniss and Peeta are on the stage with cold faces, and Haymitch, for once, is not.

Guess with our new victors, the Peacekeepers figured it wouldn't hurt to let him stay out of sight for one reaping. Neither Katniss nor Peeta speaks. They hold hands, though. The only pair to survive together. No one will be so lucky again.

Katniss' boyfriend Gale is in the crowd. Everybody in District Twelve knows about him. Nobody knows when the whole thing is going to blow up, but when it does, I suspect it will end in three bullets in three heads, and Haymitch will be our district mentor again.

"Ladies first," says Effie, and then, drumroll please…

_Not me not me not me._

"Cora Walker."

Emmaline, next to me, starts.

I realize it's my name. I've lost. I was so close, and I've lost.

All my school work, all the learning I've done, all the chores Mom said would build character, making my bed this morning. Wastes of time. I would have done better to hang out behind the Hob all day, smoking with the bad girls, enjoying myself. My life is over.

And I realize that's wrong, because Emmaline is going to volunteer.

I walk slowly to the platform. I'm trying not to cry, I'm feeling so much. Most tributes go numb with shock. I'm overcome. I hear my mother crying.

Emmaline has not volunteered.

Not that I want her to, not that I'm a coward, that I want to see my best friend die instead of me. But part of me just… _expects_ to be rescued. Because I would have rescued her.

I reach the steps and realize she's not going to volunteer.

I realize I've known my last moments of peace of my life. For the rest of my life, I will be scared, and then I will die. Soon.

Emmaline doesn't make eye contact with me while I'm up there. She's crying. I know she won't come to see me in the goodbye room. What would she say? And I understand. She's got a family to feed. She's scared. Seen too many flayings, beheadings, poisonings. Can't do it.

Maybe I couldn't have, either.

The crowd claps politely for me. I'm eighteen. At least I'm an older one, they're thinking. I'm a merchant's daughter. At least I've had a good life. I'm not a starvation case, a life of torture going to more torture. I'm a good choice.

Soren is called. I'm grateful my district partner will be cute.

He looks at me. We're both thinking: _Maybe allies_.

Since neither of us is extraordinary, and there's no volunteering or anything, the ceremony is short. My entire goodbye is spent with me and Dad trying to hold Mom together. I forget to take a District Twelve token. I don't even have time to break down before the train takes me away to a week of training with Katniss Everdeen.

###

I wake up, and it's a horrible sensation. I'm being smothered by my awful, swollen nightmare of a tongue. I can see it sticking out – it's still huge and purple, and now is dried out, with welts, but it's smaller than it was. Still horrible.

I'm not really being smothered, I realize. I can breathe. It's like when you're drowning in a nightmare, and you finally inhale, and find that your lungs are indeed working, though you can't figure out why.

"Hey, she's awake," says Soren. "Wow, Cora, you look awful. But if you survive, you've got to thank Loma anyway. I would never have thought of this."

I don't understand.

Soren takes my hand and moves it to the base of my throat, which I now realize hurts a lot. There, I find something hard and metal sticking out of my skin. I can't see what it is.

"It's one of your straws," Loma's voice says. "They're supposed to be for puncturing water pocket squirrels – I'll bet we can find some around here, they're probably another water source – but I used it for a trach tube. You're welcome."

She has cut a hole in my throat and stuck a straw in it, and I'm breathing through it. Through the base of my neck. Is that even possible? Doesn't air need to come through your nose and mouth, isn't there a filter there or something?

Loma has saved my life. Huh. I don't know what to think about that.

"More good news," says Soren.

Mika steps into my field of vision. His eyes are normal. He's not bound. He's a normal little boy again. Crying, of course. For me this time.

He doesn't say anything, but brushes my hair back gently, like my mom does when I'm sick.

I try to make a noise, to ask what happened, but it's useless.

"It took about five hours," says Soren. "So now, if one of us gets bit by a blue snake, we'll know how long to wait for the effects to wear off. Meantime, we found out you can eat the white apples."

"YOU can," I want to say. I can't believe they tested another apple after what happened to me. They must have been starving.

So am I. In spite of my disgusting mouth, I'm hungry, so hungry. I want a white apple. How long will it be before I recover?

"Relax," says Loma. "We have time."

Mika tearfully whispers in my ear. "Another cannon went off. We think it's Pec. That's enough for today. They'll let us rest."

_They didn't let us rest for even one night_, I think.

Tears spring to my eyes again. I'm thirsty. I'm hungry. I'm ugly. I want to go home.

Mika brushing my hair like Mom feels good, but it brings back my little kid feelings, and I find myself weeping in his lap while he shooshes me gently. Soren and Loma turn away.

Then…

"Cora! You have a sponsor!"

I open my eyes. A tiny package attached to a silver parachute is floating into Mika's hands. It might be for him, I think, but please, please let it be for me.

It is. A tiny hypo needle.

_Thank you, Katniss_.

She took a risk, buying something so expensive when for all we knew, the swelling might have gone down on its own. But right now I don't care. I want to look human, want to eat, want to drink, want to breathe through my face and not my neck.

I know why she did it. Her first gift from a sponsor was medicine for a burn, and we, the audience watching her, all felt her intense relief at the sight of it. She wanted to give me that same feeling.

Loma administers the shot, and five minutes later my tongue is back to normal and I'm smiling and sucking down water at an unwise rate. It's okay, we have apple juice.

Loma bandages my neck, too, now that I can breathe normally. She uses the last of the bandage roll in the first-aid kit.

My arm has been rebandaged in a torn-up sleeve of my shirt.

My tongue is cut, but not too badly. I can talk and eat. I'm going to recover.

We feast that night, the four of us, on sweet white apples, and we drink apple juice. We get sticky and gross, and since we don't want to waste water, we have to clean our hands by rubbing dirt on them until the juice solidifies and rolls off in little sticky balls.

I get to see the supplies Loma and Soren have collected: Loma's sack of water. A canteen, now full of apple juice. The axe. A tent which they've been using as a blanket, not wanting to set up an obvious target. The tent poles.

Pec was carrying rope and a spear. Guess the Careers have them now.

Not a lot, but enough. We won't have to fight each other for heat or water, that's the most important thing.

Here's the anthem.

The deaths:

Zink first. Her headshot is really pretty. Filmy, ash-brown hair, fairy features. We're all quiet as she hangs over us in the air, and I'm grateful nobody reminds me out loud how I wrecked that face, how her death was my fault.

Mika squeezes my hand. He knows what I'm thinking.

We all gasp a little at the second face that rises in the air. It's not Pec, as we thought. It's Amelia from District Seven, the last remaining non-Career who we're not allied with. She was a physically awkward, strange, nerdy type. Got a three in training.

This means we still have an ally somewhere out in the dark. We can't look for him now. Hopefully the night will camouflage him as well as us.

Mika worries that Pec will have no way to keep warm, and he's right. Pec also doesn't have water, and as far as we know, he hasn't eaten since before the Games began.

Poor Pec. His sister, then Zink, and now he's alone with no supplies, too.

Last in the sky is Gump's stupid pig face. Three, for a total of twelve. It's the end of the second day, and half of us are gone. The odds are more in our favor than ever.

Night falls quickly, and it is truly black. No more rosy glow from the sky, no stars, no moon. We use my lighter to light the way about five hundred yards from the magic, terrible black and white tree, set up my mess kit alarm, and finally sleep.

With four of us, we all take a watch.

Mika sleeps with his hand on my bite wound, after apologizing repeatedly for it. I promise him it's okay, and he kisses it several times before dropping to sleep.

The night passes peacefully.


	7. Drill Flies

In the morning, we gather and have a semi-official briefing.

Twelve remain.

Four are us: Loma and Soren, both healthy. Me, wounded, but contributing supplies, and still able to fight. Mika, useless. At least he's no longer a burden.

Somewhere out there we have a fifth ally, Pec, who must be in completely terrible condition, last seen being hunted by a gang of Careers.

Two gangs of Careers are left, and we've seen enough of them to know who's who.

There's Jewel's old group, being led by Moses now that she's dead. There's three of them, all male: Moses, Milton, and Block. They're the ones who found us yesterday and killed Gump. They also chased Pec, and as big as they are, and as well-armed, we all agree it's a miracle he survived last night. Then there's Jax's group, the greatest threat: Jax, Glory, Serena, and Chetty. Chetty, little Mika's district partner, has allied herself with the Careers. Usually District Elevens don't do that.

If she wins, her district will revile her. She won't have a good life.

There's something I notice: Moses and Serena, the ones from District Four, are on different gangs. Usually district partners at least start on the same team.

I know why, though. Serena's in love with Jax. I probably would be too, if I weren't a contestant. He's handsome and strong. This year's Finnick Odair. Moses must be so jealous.

_All_ the boys are jealous. That's why all the boys have refused to ally with Jax.

We need a plan. Both packs of Careers will be coming for us, the easy targets, before they come for each other.

"I wish we had a bunch of those blue snakes that bit Mika," says Loma.

I'm more willing to listen to her now that she's saved my life.

"Why?" I ask. "We don't want them _more_ aggressive." But even as I say it, I see what she's thinking.

"We _do _want them more aggressive _to each other_," says Loma. "If we could get a whole bunch of those snakes and hide them in a Career camp at night, in the morning they'd wake up and kill each other."

It's a plan. It's the only one we have. And we all agree that we need to act immediately, because the longer you sit around, the more likely the Gamemakers are to send a wall of fire after you, to shove you in the other players' way.

We decide to head back to the place where Mika and I slept to see if we can find the snake again.

The only one who objects is Mika.

"You don't understand," he says, clutching me and hiding his face in my armpit, after begging Soren and Loma to think of a different plan. "You don't want to do that to somebody. It's…"

He doesn't have the vocabulary to explain what the venom was like, but I can guess. Poor little Mika, overtaken by violence, rage, hatred. He'd never experienced anything like that.

I doubt it will be so traumatic for the Careers, who live for violence.

We all carry five white apples and one black. The black is to dip the edges of our weapons in, should it come to a fight.

It is also, though no one says it, something like a suicide pill.

Surely no one will use it that way after seeing the gruesome way it almost killed me – _I_ sure as hell would rather die by beating than by swollen tongue – but there have been suicides in the past.

Maybe even I could be convinced to take a bite if a wall of lava was coming down on me or something.

We are surprised when we reach the grass line – there's no grass. It's been burned away.

A bare black field stretches before us, miles across.

At the sight of it, Loma's hand snakes into Sorren's. He accepts it easily, naturally.

Now _that's _interesting.

It must have been flash grass, a special kind of kindling that burns up almost instantly with no smoke, to have gone up in the night without us noticing. Flash grass mutated to be giant. If someone had been standing in the grass when it went up, they would have gotten deep fried.

Thank goodness we didn't know the danger the last two times we crossed it.

"Do we still want to try for the snake?" I ask.

"It's a long way to be exposed," says Soren.

"They'll shoot us," says Mika. "They'll be able to see us from forever away. They'll throw spears at us. Please, don't make me go."

"Shhh," I say. "We've got to think."

We come up with a plan. We'll walk a mile to the left and back in the forest, start a fire, and hope the smoke attracts the eyes of the Careers away from the field long enough for us to cross. In the meantime, the ones who aren't setting the fire will make a soot paste and camouflage all our stuff.

Since I'm the one with the lighter and I hesitate to give it up, Mika and I are going to go start the fire.

I sigh before removing my long-sleeved shirt and handing it over to Loma and Soren for dyeing. Mika does at least this much obediently, revealing tiny, underdeveloped shoulders and the rib cage of a five-year-old.

There must really be something wrong with him, I think, for him to be so small.

How is it possible no one volunteered for this little boy, this toddler?

We walk into the woods hand in hand.

"Look at us," I say to Mika, who still doesn't like the plan. "We're Soren and Loma."

He looks at our joined hands, then raises his big grey eyes to mine. He pulls me to a stop.

"What's wrong?"

He motions for me to lean in to him, and when I do, he whispers in my ear. "Soren and Loma were _kissing_ last night," he says.

He says the word "kissing" like somebody else might say "butt sniffing." I try not to giggle at his seriousness.

"They kissed while I was on watch, under the blanket," he says. "They thought I couldn't hear, but they were smacking their lips. It made it hard to hear if anyone was coming."

"Gross!" I laugh.

"It _was_ gross."

He's serious, and doesn't understand what I see that's so funny. We walk on and gather wood, and while we work, I think.

Soren and Loma, kissing. Not that there's anything wrong with that, except that it means they'll be very strong allies now. The bond between them will outweigh any bond they've built with me and Mika. When they decide to break our alliance, it will be them against us.

Maybe Mika and I should make a run for it tonight.

Also, I wonder if Loma is faking being in love for sponsors, or to throw Soren off his guard. I think she has a boyfriend back home.

But she saved my life. I've decided to try to like her. Maybe it's Soren who's faking. I never know what Soren is thinking. He's so grim and calm.

Mika and I lay the fire, set it, and run.

The brief exposure to the firelight has temporarily taken our night vision, and Mika crashes into a tree on the way.

He goes to his knees, and I expect him to cry – he starts to – but then I watch him take a deep breath, steady himself, and mash his lips together to keep the sobbing on the inside.

I'm watching him grow up, I realize.

We meet Loma and Soren twenty minutes later, cover our faces and hair in black paste, and begin the long walk across the exposed plain.

###

The plan has apparently worked better than we could have hoped. We are almost across the plain, scuttering along with our heads down, bent in half by paranoia, when we hear yelling coming from the direction of our fire. Multiple voices, angry voices.

"It drew both gangs," whispers Loma in delight.

Maybe they'll fight each other. Kill a few of themselves. Whatever happens, they're too far away now to catch us before we reach the rocks.

We walk straighter. Most of us. Mika is still walking too close to me, grabbing me at any noise, making me a human shield against the night.

We have almost reached the rock we're looking for, but then…

A whistle, a zinging noise in the air. Loma flinches.

Mika screams.

Loma collapses to her knees - Soren catches her so she doesn't fall all the way down - and I see the back half of an arrow sticking out of her chest, just under the clavicle.

"Mika!" I cry, and he hurls himself into my arms. I spin while trying to cover him with my body, turning to see where the arrow came from.

"Sons of bitches," comes a voice from our right.

Another _zing_. Soren has pulled the water sack in front of himself just in time; the arrow buries itself in the pack instead of in his sternum.

"You left me," says the voice. "_Left me_ to them!"

"Pec!" cries Soren.

Pec is perched on the top of our rock, ten feet high, like a gargoyle or a wolf. His cloak made him look like part of it, that's why we didn't see him.

He leaps down, landing lightly before us, and I note with relief that his quiver is empty.

Soren has stepped back from Loma. He's not shielding her with his body the way I was shielding Mika.

_Guess we know who the faker was,_ I think.

"Look what they did," Pec says. "_Look what YOU did._"

He pulls back his hood, and we gasp.

His face is a mangled mess, puffed up, barely human, both swollen and pocked.

I notice his hands are like that, too.

"They caught me," he says. "The Careers. But they didn't want to just kill me. They wanted to put on a show. For the cameras. Wanted to drag it out. Know what they did? They threw me in a drill fly nest."

Oh, god.

Drill flies are like tracker jackers, mutated insects used for similar purposes by the Capitol. Unlike tracker jackers, their venom doesn't kill, and they don't just sting.

They drill. They drill using ghastly rotating teeth on the tops of their heads, and they bury their whole bodies inside you.

There, they lay their eggs.

And after about a week, they hatch. All at once.

Pec has been issued a worse death sentence than we could dream of. He's going to explode. In the meantime, he's living with hundreds of flies in his face, his skin, his body. He can feel their drills, feel them moving, feel the baby maggots growing inside him.

"We're sorry, Pec, but you know we couldn't help you," says Soren calmly. "Even if we'd been there. We thought you were dead until later that night. We heard a cannon. What could we have done?"

"You could have stopped them. And even if you couldn't…_I would have come looking for you,_" says Pec. "Any of you! That's what allies do!"

He advances, and there's something in his hand.

"Knife!" I cry.

Soren leaps back, but he leaves Loma, and Pec is still advancing. Loma tries to scramble away. Her hands are wrapped around the arrow shaft, she's breathing hard, but she's not dead yet. She might even survive, if we can defeat Pec.

Loma saved my life. I can't leave her.

So I peel Mika off me and step between Loma and Pec.

Up close, he's worse than I thought. The flies in his skin are visibly moving. All I can see are his eyes and mouth, no nose, no ears. And his eyes are crazy. Who wouldn't be crazy, with what he's been through?

"You," he spits. "Cora Walker, nice blonde babysitter. Not so nice you couldn't ram Zink's face down her throat, were you?"

"Back off, Pec," I say. "We outnumber you."

"Not a chance," he says. "I've been looking for you. Who do you think set the fire?"

Oh, so it wasn't the Careers at all. This relieves me a little. It means the Careers aren't running around the empty fields looking for us now that they've realized our deception.

"You set this fire?" I say. "How? You didn't have anything."

"I had sponsors," he hisses back. "Sympathy. After my sister… I got food, water, this cloak, matches… everything you could have given me if you'd come back and looked FOR TWO DAMN SECONDS!"

I realize this is true. We couldn't have saved Pec's life, but we could have given him comfort. We shouldn't have given him up for dead.

"Look," I say, but he interrupts me by hurling his knife.

Not at me. Past me. I spin to see if it's hit Mika, but it turns out Pec was aiming at Soren.

Soren, who has abandoned us. He's twenty feet back and still running. I realize he was holding my club, and he has also taken Loma's axe. Plus other supplies: the mess kit, the first-aid kit.

He's leaving us, and taking our stuff.

Unbelievable.

"Traitor!" cries Loma, with real anguish in her voice. "You're gonna die for this, Soren!"

"Look out!" Mika cries, pointing, and I turn in time to get punched in the gut by Pec.

"Odds are better for me now, aren't they?" he yells, pummeling me. He hits my bad arm and I double over.

"Who outnumbers who?" He kicks me in the shins. "What were you saying, Cora?"

I get my act together, use my height, wrestle him to the ground.

I find it's hard to punch him, though, and not just because of my injuries. I'm afraid he's going to explode all over me. My fist will make a hole and a thousand drill flies will pour out.

He has no such reservations. And he has another knife. He must have gotten a pack of them, like the one I left at Cornucopia.

"Pec, listen to me!" I cry as we roll. "Don't do this! Don't kill anybody – you're going to die anyway. There's no point."

This does not come out that smoothly. It comes out in spurts, between punches and dodges.

"Would your sister want you to kill us, Pec?" Loma tries. She's lying on her back now, watching the fight, with Mika standing over her, a tiny, shaking guard.

"Maybe not," Pec hisses, "But my parents would. They need one kid to come back. That's fair, isn't it?"

He digs his fingers into my arm wound and hits an exposed nerve. I scream. Very, very loudly.

I've just given away our location. It might not matter. Pec might kill me before the Careers get here.

"I kill you," he grinds out from between swollen lips, "I have maybe three days to kill the others. The Capitol can cure me. I can do it. I want it more than you. I _deserve _it more than you. You spoiled, blonde brat."

Something hits his head.

Mika has thrown the knife, the one that was meant for Soren, at his head. He threw it weakly, poorly, but he did it.

That's my boy.

Pec's distracted, and I do the only thing left that I can do. With my left hand, I claw up a handful of blackened, ashy dirt and fling it into his eyes.

He rears back, and cries out.

Loma's up. She has removed her arrow and stabbed Pec in the side with it.

I retrieve the knife.

I stab Pec in the gut.

And again.

His cannon goes.

Pec doesn't explode where I stab him, but while his body is lying there waiting for the hovercraft, a few tiny maggots crawl out of the wounds.

I vomit.

But I've won. This was my first kill, my first real one. The others, I just put in other people's paths. This one was all me.

I realize I could do it again, if I had to.

But we're in bad shape.

Pec dead, Loma and I wounded, all of us exposed, location revealed. Our weapons gone, thanks to Soren the traitor. And now I have black soot paste in my arm wound.

It's only day three. Dear god.

Leave it to Loma to snark, "Well, at least we didn't have to fight the Careers. That would have really sucked."


	8. Snakes on a Parachute

Loma has gotten to her feet, but she's swaying. We won't be able to make it back to the safety of the forest. The field is just too wide, and she's too injured.

We decide to seek shelter among the rocks. Maybe we can just hide out for a day or two to recover.

Mika wants to run right away, but Loma stops him.

"First let's get what we came for," she says. "We're ten freaking feet away."

She waits, standing unsteadily in the same place she was shot, while Mika and I return to our base rock from the first night to look for blue snakes.

The base of the rock is shadowed. I risk the lighter. Why not? My scream will have given our location away for miles, so we need speed, not secrecy.

And unbelievably, there it is: a mound of dirt about the size of a basketball that, when I peel at the opening with a stick, reveals a clump of small blue snakes. Mika flies backwards, but I can see that they're docile. If they were the kind of mutt snakes you see in some Games, the kind that jump at your face and keep biting even after you've injured them, we would already know.

I also know something else: This mound was absolutely _not_ here the first night. It's big. Mika and I would have been almost on top of it. No way I would have missed it.

The Gamemakers must have heard us planning to find more snakes, liked the plan, and laid this here for us to find.

I don't like the idea of playing into their hands. Oh, well.

The three of us drink the remaining apple juice from the canteen, then I scoop the snakes, which are (conveniently) sleepy, into it. No time to poke air holes. I'll open the canteen once in a while as we walk to make sure they don't die.

After we've finally gotten moving, and are maybe a quarter mile into the rocks – moving very slowly, with Loma injured and dizzy as she is – torches appear at the tree line.

The torches are moving toward us quickly.

I hear female voices in the distance, and realize it must be Jax's gang. Jax, Serena, Chetty, Glory.

All huge Careers. All, except Jax, crazy in a different way.

"Loma, can you climb?" I say. "We've got to get on top of one of these tall rocks."

The rocks here jut out wildly from the earth, like porcupine spines, but there are places, platforms, where you could hide if you could get to them.

Loma purses her lips, darts her eyes, thinks. Comes up blank.

"No," she says. "I can't climb. And it wouldn't do any good. For any of us. We'll leave a trail, soot and blood. They'll find us."

"We should run for the beach," says Mika, whose hand is cold in mine. "We could swim. Get clean. They wouldn't know which way we went."

Loma and I look at each other. We both have open wounds. Salt water won't kill us…but it will make us wish we were dead.

In the end, we don't have any choice. We can only move in one direction: Away from the oncoming torches. That means toward the beach.

Loma isn't doing well. She's falling every twenty feet or so, and neither Mika or I can be much help. Mika is too weak to pull her up, and I'm a beat-up mess. And my arm, the bite wound is killing me.

Every time Loma falls, she leaves a little pool of blood.

I try to be patient, but my heart and mind are racing.

_Abandon her_, my brain says. _You can't save them both. It has to be Mika. Loma's probably going to die anyway._

Loma falls again, and curses Soren. "Stupid," she mumbles. "I really thought he liked me. He kept saying all this stuff about the Capitol. I thought he was a rebel… that he wasn't going to play their game. Can't believe I fell for it. I'm smarter than that."

"Hey," I say, "I had kind of fallen for it too. And he is cute."

"Not for long," says Loma. "'Cause when I see him next, I'm going to claw his face off."

_If _she sees him again. If she survives the next hour.

I look back. The runners with torches will be on us in maybe five minutes. At the rate we're dropping, this will be the fastest Hunger Games ever, especially if they get all three of us at once.

Loma finally collapses and can't get up. Her shirt is soaked with blood. It's on her lips, too.

"Damn it," she says. "Pec. Soren." She looks up at me. "I can't believe you're the one I should have trusted."

"Back at you," I say.

"Go on, don't be stupid," she says.

I hesitate. Mika hesitates now, too, despite him being the most afraid.

"I'm not Pec, I'm not going to come after you tomorrow," Loma says. "Get the hell out of here. I'll think of something."

She at least lets us drag her to a little hiding place, a crevice between three oddly-sized rocks, with shrubbery protection.

I really do want to run. My pride makes me wait a few seconds longer.

"Think about Mika," Loma says. She's trying not to cry.

"I know," I say. "I would stay if I could."

She nods.

Mika and I run.

We may have waited too long. The torches are minutes away. I think surely the Careers can see us as we scramble up the side of a random rock, then try to flatten ourselves on our bellies at the top of it. Apparently they can't.

They run right on by, and as I feared they would, they follow Loma's blood trail right to her.

They kill her with spears. I can tell by the sound. Her cannon goes off, and they cheer like it's a party.

I'm madder at Soren than I am at them, though. What kind of self-respecting District Twelve…?

The thought that Peeta, his mentor, must be disgusted with him as well is comforting. Maybe he won't send Soren any gifts.

"Cora," Mika whispers in my ear. "If we stay here all night, won't we freeze?"

"We'll get out the blanket when the anthem plays," I whisper back.

We wait, unmoving, for an hour, while the Careers look for us.

At first I am afraid they'll find the trail our camouflage left, but in the flickering torch shadows I can see that the fire has left everything covered in black. We won't have made a discernible difference.

I realize they're not going to find us, and relax a little. These Careers aren't so tough. They can't do what skinny little Pec was able to.

However, I have another problem. My arm.

The bite is now definitely infected. It's oozing thick yellow pus, and it's dirty and swollen. I keep squeezing it while we lie there waiting, and more pus keeps coming out. I desperately want to take out one of the water bottles and wash it, but I can't risk the noise.

Mika watches guiltily while I wince and struggle, biting back the pain that adrenaline had until now managed to mask. How am I going to make it through the night?

"Mika," I whisper, "While the anthem's playing, I'll get the blanket. You open the water, okay?"

He nods eagerly, wanting to help. What a good kid.

The Careers make camp about fifty yards from us. Unlucky, but at least they're not right underneath us. We'll be able to shuffle a little without being heard.

"We're going to lose them if we stay here all night!" comes a high, annoying voice. Chetty, the girl from District Eleven who refused to be allies with Mika.

"So what? We'll get them eventually." Jax. He's relaxed – he knows none of these girls are going to turn on him. They're in love with him.

"Easy for you to say," says Chetty. "Mister 'I'm gorgeous and have a million sponsors.' That little kid may not be tough, but he's so cute, he's taking the sponsors from the rest of us. I know it. And that blonde girl, with her fake goody-two-shoes act. They're popular. I want them gone."

This is an interesting theory she has. Especially since Mika has received no gifts so far.

"What makes you think the sponsors will come over to your side one they're dead?" That's Glory, the girl with the fake eyelashes. "Maybe they'll give presents to me and Serena."

"God, your voice is annoying."

_Shut up, Chetty, you're in no position to talk,_ I think. Chetty's voice is like her appearance: Bony, grating, off somehow.

"Ladies." That's Jax's voice. "If they're here, they're on one of these rocks. They can't get down without us hearing them. We can find them in the morning. No reason to search now. We'll be able to look for them by the glow in the morning."

_The glow._ That's what he's calling daytime. It's a perfect description of the weird violet light.

He has also just potentially written my and Mika's death sentence.

If they look for us in the morning, they'll find us. They'll have time to climb every rock to check. We'll be the third or fourth rock they try.

The anthem starts to play, and I get out the blanket in a panic. Mika is calmer as he readies the water bottle. He even has time to take out two apples for our dinner.

Faces in the sky:

Loma.

Pec.

Fourteen down, ten remaining.

I breathe hard. I have a one in ten chance of winning the Hunger Games. Ten percent. Double digits. It's in sight.

All I have to do is kill the four giant Careers from the top of this rock. Then three others. Then Soren. Then Mika.

Mika is a good little doctor. I cut a little square of fabric from my shirt, using the first-aid-kit scissors, and he uses the square to gently clean my wound. He doesn't waste the water. A few drops, a gentle wipe. A few more drops.

The cleaning hurts at first, but it starts to feel good. Like a massage. I might fall asleep. I keep myself awake by munching on my delicious white apple.

"We need a plan," I say.

"What do you mean? We have one," he answers.

I turn to him, not that I can see him in the complete black that has settled. Oh, god, what if we drop off the edge in the dark?

Mika takes my good hand and guides it to something he's holding. It's hard plastic.

The canteen.

The canteen full of blue snakes.

"We have to do it soon," he whispers. "I have to pee."

It's all I can do not to giggle. I have to pee too.

We deal with that first. It's easy enough for him. He can roll over and do it sideways, off the side of the rock. He's on the far side from the Careers. I have to shimmy down, awkwardly pull my pants down, pee with my hips in the air, then shimmy back without getting it all over myself. But I manage. The angle of the rock is right.

"Now we definitely have to survive," I say to him. "This absolutely can't be my last night on earth." I'm really trying not to laugh. It's hysteria.

Mika knows that my laughter is on the verge of turning into tears.

"We just have to put the snakes in their beds," he says.

"Just that easy," I say with a sigh. "Well, at least I'm glad you're on board with the plan now."

He's quiet a minute, then he says, "I don't want you to die."

Aw.

"Well, then, we've got to use our brains, and figure out a way to get these snakes in their camp without a) them knowing about it, and b), especially without them seeing where they came from."

"We could throw the canteen," he says. "They won't be able to see where it came from in the dark."

It is really, truly dark now that the Careers have extinguished their torches. And we can still hear their voices, well enough to make them a fair target.

"Maybe I can do it," I say. "_Maybe_. But my throwing arm is hurt. And they'd hear the canteen land. We want to surprise them, to get them all. We want them to get bitten in their sleep."

Mika is silent for a minute.

"We could climb down… but they'd hear us," he says.

"We could throw the snakes one at a time," I say. "But that's so imprecise. And they'd hear them land."

Something lands on my face, and I almost, _almost, _scream and get us both killed.

"I got a gift!" I whisper. "Mika, I got a gift from a sponsor!"

It's plastic, it unfolds…what is it? The parachute is in my way – it's strangely huge, for such a small, light package – I have to untie it… and then I figure it out.

"Yes," I say. "Mika. It's night vision glasses."

I slip them on, and the world lights up. I shimmy to the edge and look out over the Careers' camp.

"Katniss," I say, "Thank you. _Thank you._"

I can see them all. Jax has first watch, apparently. The girls are lying down. They've set up some kind of barrier, a net to keep out animals. And us. But it's only a foot high.

And his "watch" isn't really that. He's just looking out into the night with his eyes open. They've put their fires out, and he doesn't have night vision glasses like me. He's blind.

For the first time, it occurs to me to wonder how the Capitol is watching these games if we're in the dark all the time. The cameras must be infrared, or have lenses made of this same night vision stuff. It must make for strange viewing. All the colors are wrong.

I'm relaying this to Mika, and he whispers intensely, "I know what to do. She gave you everything you need, Cora."

He fumbles around, gets hold of the… the parachute?

The parachute.

He shoves it into my hands.

"You, little man, are a genius," I say.

Now that I think about it, I can't remember why this hasn't been tried in a Hunger Games before. People have used their parachutes as water carriers, bandages, things like that, but they've never used them, as far back as I can remember, for their original, intended purpose.

And why not? The parachute is undamaged, and it's made of amazing material, material that picks up the wind so well it seems to suck it in, rather than just catch it. It will float wherever you push it.

Katniss has given me a big one, big enough to do the job I need it to do.

"Is the wind strong enough?" I ask, and just like that, the breeze picks up, blowing in the Careers' direction.

The Gamemakers must be dying for this to work. To show off their evil, personality-altering venom in such a theatrical context.

They'll make this work, even if I do my best to screw it up.

Wearing the night vision goggles, I carefully tie the bottom strings of the parachute around the lip of the canteen holding all our blue snakes. There are six of them, we've got to get at least two or three bites…And, I realize, the snakes are more awake now. Whatever the Gamemakers did to make them sluggish enough for me to catch them, it's worn off. They're squirming all around in the jar.

Now the key part, the hardest part.

I edge my upper body over the lip of the rock.

The wind wants to grab the parachute right away, but first I have to do the most dangerous thing.

Remove the lid.

It turns out I can't do it and control the parachute. Eventually I make Mika hold the jar still from the bottom while with one hand I snatch off the lid and with the other, lift the parachute in position.

I grab the side of the jar and gently but firmly push the little parcel in the direction of the Careers.

That's it. My whole plan, my life, depends on the jar finding its way down to them.

It does. The Gamemakers steer it.

I watch, holding my breath, as the jar comes to a stop in the center of their group.

I had hoped it would land silently, but it makes a little noise. Jax is startled.

He leaps to his feet, runs to where the sound was and – I try not to squeak – he knocks the canteen on its side. The snakes quickly squiggle out. The jar is empty before Jax picks it up.

"Ladies," he says, "Wake up. We got something from a sponsor."

I hold my breath.

They stir. A torch is lit. They lean in to see what gift they've been given, and their confusion is really funny when they try to figure out why a sponsor would send them a canteen without a lid.

Fortunately, one of them comes up with an almost too-right explanation. "Jax," says Glory, "You knocked it over. Maybe it had something in it that got out."

"Like what?"

"Maybe we should look around."

They look around. They don't find the snakes. Confused and upset, but not suspecting me and Mika, they eventually return to their positions.

For a while I wonder if the snakes have really slithered out of the camp, but these are Capitol-designed monsters. Designed to target people. They're there. They'll strike. Probably in the morning, like they did with Mika.

All I can do is wait.


	9. Eating Each Other

I thought I wouldn't be able to sleep up here on this rock, but I haven't been eating and I've been in near-constant terror for three days. I drop off after an hour, and wake to a beautiful sound.

The Careers are fighting each other.

I roll over and shake Mika awake.

He smiles at the sound, smiles the way a normal kid would smile at a butterfly.

"It worked," he says.

"So far, sounds like it."

The Careers have lit the torches, so we don't need the night vision glasses. Grown bold with being safe on our perch for so long, we both approach the edge and simply watch the unfolding fight.

Serena, the District Four girl, has not been bitten, but the other three have. Their eyes are changed just the way Mika's were: black and red. They have her surrounded.

"What's wrong, Serena? What's wrong?" Chetty pokes Serena with the butt of a spear. Serena tries to back away from her, but Glory's in her way, with two flint knives.

Jax gets close to her, real close up in her face. "Gonna cry, Serena? Big girl like you?" He puckers his lips at her. "Let me kiss it better."

"Stop it! What is this? What's wrong with you?"

Poor Serena. Does she have any clue what has happened? Did they ever see the snakes? Or does she just think she woke up and found her crew mutated, a personal attack by the Gamemakers against her?

Poke. Shove. A harder shove.

Serena's down. She's yelling. "Quit it! I said stop it, this isn't funny! You're sick or something, guys, if you could see your eyes, you don't want to do this!"

And so on. The infected three laugh and laugh. The shoves get more and more serious.

Finally, Serena shrieks, "If you're going to kill me, just do it! Why are you playing with me like this?"

The other three grin, evil grins, as one.

"You know what? You're right," says Glory. "We don't want to do this." She drops her weapon.

"Yeah," says Jax. "We don't need these."

He and Chetty drop their weapons.

They still have Serena surrounded. They step closer, closer.

Then they jump on her, and they start using their teeth.

"We should run now," I whisper to Mika. "They won't hear us."

No way. Not over those screams. I instinctively touch my infected bite wound, remembering how it hurt so much when Mika ripped my skin away. That's what Serena is feeling right now, all over.

I did that to her.

To save Mika, I remind myself. It's not just me I'm taking care of. And Katniss thought it was a good idea. She helped.

Still, I think this is the first death I'm really going to feel guilty about when all this is over.

_Will you feel bad about Mika's death?_ my brain asks.

Maybe the Gamemakers will kill him.

Yeah, because they're so merciful that way.

No time to think like that right now. We have to get off this rock.

Shimmy shimmy shimmy. We make a lot of noise, with my backpack and the water bottles and my bad arm. Plus Mika's just a clumsy climber. But they don't hear us. And a sweet noise reaches my ears as we begin to run away.

Chetty and Jax, it seems, have turned on Glory.

Those pretty eyelashes won't help her now.

We tiptoe for five minutes, and a cannon fires. Two minutes later, another.

Eight left. Maybe seven, soon. Maybe Jax will kill Chetty. Or the other way around, I'm not picky, but surely Jax would win in a fight between the two. He's got fifty pounds on Chetty.

Eight. Eight! Such a small number!

"We're in the top third," I whisper to Mika.

We hug.

It hurts my arm, and I wince.

"You need medicine," Mika says. "Ask Katniss for some."

I'm pretty sure that the hypo from earlier and my night vision glasses have used up all our money, but I ask the sky for help anyway. It doesn't answer.

"What about some meat, then?" I say to the sky. "Something salty."

After two days of apples, I'm dying for real food.

"We should hunt today," says Mika. "I learned how to make a snare. We still have the twine."

"We do, don't we?" I should be happy about this plan. It's good. We're as safe as we can be, having killed twice today, and having so few people in the arena. But I'm too tired to really be happy. The arm is making me sick.

We make it to the forest, and I have to rest. For the first time since the Games started, I permit Mika to leave my side. He takes a couple hours to eagerly set up a dozen snares before coming back to rest with me.

The snares work. By the end of the day Mika, my little innocent Mika, has caught a rabbit and a horrible lizard monster. I kill them both with a rock. We decide not to try to eat the lizard.

Though Mika had to run out of sight while I killed the animals, once they're dead, he takes up the messy work of skinning them. He doesn't do it very well, because all we have that's sharp is Gump's arrow and my first aid scissors, but I can't help. Killing the animals exhausted me.

I'm really sick.

My arm wound is disgusting. I keep searching the sky for medicine, but it doesn't come.

Before we eat, we do something incredibly wasteful, but I can't live another second without it. We use one of the water bottles, a whole one – we have two left afterwards – to have a bath. We're careful with it, and manage to get the bulk of the grime off our faces, necks, and arms. The blood, the soot, the dirt, the apple juice.

Even if we die of thirst now, I don't think I'll regret this indulgence. It feels so good to be clean.

Rather than light a real fire, we make kebabs out of little chunks of the rabbit meat and cook them individually with the lighter. It doesn't take long, maybe five minutes, and we only use up a third of the lighter fluid. There's still lots more, a whole extra bottle.

The meat doesn't taste salty, and it's salt I crave, but I absolutely can't eat any more apple. And the meat tastes fine, anyway. Hunger is the best spice, like Mom always says.

After we eat, I can't move. Full and sick. I have to sleep. For the rest of the day, the only thing that stirs me is the sound of one more cannon.

"I don't think it's for Chetty or Jax," says Mika. "The venom should have worn off by now. It's been more than five hours."

At night we watch the sky.

Glory. Serena. Milton, he was the third cannon. The boy from District Seven, who was with Moses' gang of Careers. Anything could have killed him. Poison, animal attack, he could have tripped on a brick. Whatever happened, it's good news. There are now only four Careers left, two on each team.

Chetty and Jax. Moses and Block.

Also left: Soren, our traitor.

Mika.

Me.

So few.

We'll be done within a week, for sure.

With this arm infection, though…do I have a week to live?


	10. Squirrel Juice and the Feast

Fever hallucinations come on that night.

Mika turns into Caesar, and I'm back at my interview, wearing the silly blue gingham gown that I think is a little over the top. I look like a doll.

"How many bites does it take to eat Serena?" Caesar asks me.

"Well," I say, "It took two people five minutes. But I don't know if they ate all of her. Probably they left a lot. They had to leave room for Glory."

I giggle uncontrollably.

"For dessert."

I realize I'm sitting on a throne of writhing blue snakes. I can't move off it. Can't move my limbs at all.

Caesar shakes me. "Cora, Cora," he says in Mika's voice. Then suddenly it is Mika, and he's crying. "Soren stole our water."

I try to come up from my fever dream. It's so hard. All I want to do is sleep. And I especially don't want to deal with bad news.

Through hiccups, Mika tells me the story. He was trying to get us moved into a more hidden spot, a cave, and Soren popped up behind him and grabbed the sack of water from him.

He swung the axe, too, but Mika ran away. It took him two hours to find me again.

Now he's exhausted and thirsty and mad, same as me.

My throat started to burn the instant I heard the water was gone.

There are no lakes, no ponds, no streams. The ocean water is salty and we have no filter.

Luckily, Mika had left the backpack with me. We have two white apples left. We eat them. The juice will keep us from dying for the rest of the day, hopefully, but then we'll have to figure something out.

"Set more snares, Mika," I say. "We got those straws. That means there have to be water pocket squirrels somewhere."

His face crumples. "Cora, I can't do a water pocket squirrel. I can't. You know I can't. Don't make me."

Water pocket squirrels are just what you'd think. They're squirrels with big sacs on their bellies that contain drinkable water. They've shown up in three Hunger Games that I can remember.

Watching contestants drink from them is disgusting. Sometimes they bite right in – I've seen tributes do it while the squirrel is still alive – and sometimes they poke a hole and drain the water out. The water is cloudy and gross. It looks like you would expect it would after coming out of a squirrel's stomach. I'm not even sure _I'll_ be able to drink it.

Mika will probably barf.

He sets up snares all over, though. We've run out of twine at last, so he has to reuse old ones.

In the meantime, we return to the black and white tree, hoping for more apple juice, but we find the tree completely stripped of white apples.

Maybe it was Soren, maybe the Careers. Whoever it was, they made sure nobody else could use this food source.

With me sick, and not wanting to waste energy, the day passes in a quick, sleepy haze.

For the first time in this Hunger Games, we go a full day with no cannon, no faces in the sky.

There is one development.

Claudius Templesmith has an announcement.

Tomorrow there will be a feast.

###

Mika tells me in the morning, tearfully, that he has caught a water pocket squirrel, just one.

I know from past Games that it will contain about two cups of water. Enough to wake both of us up, keep dehydration at bay until we get us to the feast, which will be held at eleven. We have to get there early, because of course we don't have watches. The only way to keep time is by the sunrise…glow-rise, I guess…which I estimate to happen at 6 a.m.

It takes everything Mika has to bring the squirrel to me. He's not holding it very tightly. I can tell he hopes it escapes so he doesn't have to deal with drinking from it.

But I'm the firm babysitter. I pat his head, take the snare leash from him, and kill the squirrel. It takes about ten minutes, because my aim is terrible. I'm sick and my arm is weak.

At least there isn't blood poisoning yet. No black lines, just general infection.

There will be antibiotics at the feast. Templesmith said so. "Everything you could want. Food. Water. Medicine. It's a second Cornucopia!"

Mika holds his breath as I position the sharp end of one of our metal straws over the swollen belly of the squirrel.

"Do we have to drink straight from it?" he moans. "Don't we have something we can put the water in?"

I almost say no, but then I remember: The little plastic bag that the blanket came in. It's about the size of a fist, enough to hold Mika's share of the water.

We find the bag jammed in the bottom of our backpack, the top shredded, but the bottom intact.

Mika holds the bag open and looks away while I, after a deep breath, stick the straw into the squirrel.

Water gushes out immediately, splashing in my eye before I can aim it into the bag properly.

The bag fills quickly, and water is still spurting.

I gag and close my mouth over the end of the straw. This is too valuable to waste, I know. But it's so, so gross. Spurt, spurt. Squirrel juice. It's _warm._

It takes all my willpower not to vomit, and to swallow the water. Mika, who has not even tasted his cloudy water, gacks loudly.

After a few seconds, the insistent squirting stops, and I am able to breathe deep and sip more slowly, at my leisure.

"Drink yours, Mika," I say. He's just watching me suck on the straw, straight from the squirrel.

He gets this look on his face, like a two-year-old who won't eat his vegetables. "I don't wanna."

"You have to."

"No." He shuts his mouth tightly, shakes his head.

I do not need this.

"Mika Malone, you drink your water!"

Head shake.

"Two sips. Start with two sips, then you can take a break."

Head shake.

"Mika, your mother is watching. She's telling you to drink your water. You know that, right? She's yelling at the screen right now. Behave yourself."

He squirms. "You're not the boss of me."

"You drink that water," I say, "Or I will take the pack and leave you. You can go to the feast by yourself."

His lips tremble.

"Two sips," I repeat. "One, two. Do it quick, so it won't be so bad."

It takes another five minutes to get him to close his eyes and grimace as he sips. Another hour to get him to finish his bag.

Probably all the talking I do dries me out so much that the water was useless. The good thing about it, though, is that in trying to set a good example I learn to drink the squirrel juice without gagging. I show off how "good" it is by sucking even once the squirrel is mostly dried out.

By now it must be nine. We've got to get to the Cornucopia.

The possibility of not attending the feast doesn't seriously occur to either of us.

Mika wants real water. He can't stand the thought of more squirrels. I need medicine. If I don't get it, I'll die anyway. I also need more bandages for my arm and neck. We both crave real food, too. I've put the squirrel body in our pack. We don't want to eat meat until we have water to wash it down with.

And we need new weapons.

We try to strategize as we walk. We don't come up with much. I'm greatly slowed down. Mika was slow to begin with.

"Maybe everybody else is in as bad shape as we are," I say hopefully. "They don't usually hold feasts until most of the people are desperate for something."

Mika's trembling again. After this morning's tantrum, he's regressed a little from the maturity he had been developing. He's almost back to where he was at the beginning of the Games, a weepy, useless, young-for-his-age twelve-year-old.

He's lucky he's cute, is all I can think. This kind of behavior would get you killed like Gump got killed if you weren't cute enough to pull it off.

We arrive late – a hole in the ground is already opening next to the Cornucopia. We watch a platform filled with treasure rise from the ground. I put on my night vision glasses to get a good look.

Water bottles, more beautiful, sparkling water bottles. Rattling pill containers spill off the edge when the platform settles into place, all with big labels. Antifungal. Antibiotic. Pain suppressant. Antiinflammatory.

Fruits – big dew-flecked grapes, cut melons.

And packs of real food. Nuts and dried meats, cheese, even canned soups. The thought of salt makes my head spin.

Mika is staring at the pile with naked longing, but his feet are shuffling in the little kid way, like he has to pee. He wants to run.

"It's okay," I say. "I'll go. You stay here."

"You're too weak to go," he says, but without enthusiasm. He wants me to do it, to be the grownup.

Katniss rewards me for remembering my good girl role. It's not much – the parachute that floats down to us is only three inches across, and the package it carries is smaller than Mika's thumb, and nearly weightless.

I open it up to find two bright green pills.

They aren't medicine. I know what they are, from previous Games.

Energy pills.

They're as cheap a gift as you can get, cheaper than a loaf of bread or water. They're like a cup of super coffee. Contestants usually get sent them in the last days of the Games, when all the money has run out and the whole Game comes down to staying awake enough to fight for the last forty-eight hours. They give you a major energy surge for about an hour.

That will be all I need.

I take one and a half of them, and give the remaining half pill to Mika.

"So you're just going to walk in?" he asks.

"No, we'll wait until the first fight happens," I say. I'm feeling better already. "Then I'll run in, grab a water and antibiotics, and run out during the distraction. There's only seven of us left. Soren won't be here, so that's six. Minus me and you… that's only four people to fight. Not so bad."

The caffeine in the energy pill has my heart racing, though. There's always, ALWAYS at least one fatality per feast.

Mika puts a finger to his lips, the "quiet!" gesture, and points.

Someone is braving the feast.

It's Chetty, and she's not in great shape. One of her legs is torn up. The wound can't be as bad as it looks, or she couldn't be walking on it. It must be mostly superficial.

Her brown hair is matted. It looks like she just slept in a mud pile and dragged herself straight here. She has a bow and arrow, though, and she keeps them in a position where she could easily grab them while she begins stuffing food into the front of her shirt.

She won't be able to wield the bow and arrow once she's carrying water bottles, I realize. When she goes for the water I'll run in.

Mika grabs my arm.

"Her eyes!" he says.

My night vision, the slightly off colors and my spinning head have made me miss something else that's wrong with Chetty's face. Her eyes are still red and black. She's still infected with the blue snake venom.

How? It's been two days. Mika was only infected half a day.

Maybe Chetty really got bit, like three or four times. I wonder about Jax. Has the venom worn off for him? It must have, or Chetty would be dead.

Chetty has water bottles under one arm now. I have to go.

In and out. Fast.

The energy pills give me courage, or at least I imagine they do.

I take a deep breath and burst from our hiding spot, sprinting up behind Chetty. She spins, drops the water bottles, tries to raise her bow.

I knock her to the ground. She loses the bow, and I jump on it, snapping it in half.

Then I grab a water bottle, a pill bottle labeled antibiotics, and a pack of dried meat, and turn to run back.

Chetty grabs my ankle and trips me. My bounty spills across the ground.

I turn to face her.

Blood still surrounds her mouth. Blood from Serena and Glory. Gore is caught in her teeth. Gross.

We're wrestling, and since we're both injured and the same sized, we're evenly matched, and then I hear the Thud Thud Thud of male footsteps slamming up to us.

It's Moses and Block. Medium-sized Career boys, dressed head to toe in thick dried-leather armor, carrying a legitimate arsenal of weapons.

From a few yards away, Moses flings a spear. I've seen him aim a trident, and know he's not going to miss.

Chetty and I instinctively roll together at the last possible moment. The spear digs up the ground at my back, and slices through my shirt and a layer of skin. Moses is preparing another spear while Block runs for the food.

I frantically yank Chetty up, trying to use her as a human shield against Moses. She hisses, gnashing her messed-up teeth, and digs her nails into my shoulders.

But Moses never throws his spear.

A huge, dark shape rams into him with astonishing force, pounding him to the ground.

Block turns, alarmed, and calls his ally's name.

The shape is Jax, big handsome Jax, and oh my god.

He hasn't recovered from the venom, either. If anything, he's worse.

His face is covered in blood, his eyes are so artificially red they seem to glow.

His expression is inhuman. Deep lines and hollows are carved all around his face, turning his healthy, classic features into a demonic mask.

He's whaling on Moses' face, the only exposed part of Moses' body. At the sight, Chetty shrieks and wrenches herself out of my grip. She flings herself, not at me, but at Jax and Moses. She gets her mouth on one of Moses' fingers and bites it off while Block and I stand staring in horror.

Block makes eye contact with me over this mess. I see him trying to think of a way to rescue his friend.

This is my chance. I have no attachment to the players in this fight.

I grab what I can, two water bottles, my pills, three cans of soup. I stuff it all in my backpack as I run.

Then I go back for one more thing: A new club. It served me so well before, and I need a weapon.

Moses is unconscious now. Jax and Chetty are eating him.

Where's Block?

Wham!

A blow to the back of my head lays me out, blinds me.

Block. He's going to kill me. I have barely thought about him the whole Games. He's a faceless Career from District Two, just a brute like the rest of them.

I roll and find him standing over me with a brute's weapon, a big stick that looks like he pulled a branch straight off a tree. He raises it to smash down on me.

Then he curses. Turns.

Mika runs away from him, screaming. He's holding Gump's arrow.

_I told you to stay put, you little monster,_ I think. _Why would you leave the woods?_ I'm too beaten-up to speak.

"What the hell?" says Block. He puts his hand to his hip and it comes away bloody. Just a little bloody. Mika has stabbed him, poked him really.

Then Block gasps and grabs at the wound. Scratches at it.

Collapses.

Poison. The black apple poison. Mika has dipped his arrow tip in it, and saved my life.

One last time today, please let it be the last time, I stagger to my feet. Grab stuff.

The head wound makes me drunk. I can barely understand what I'm getting, and I know I'm moving incredibly slowly. I drop water bottles twice on my way away from the Cornucopia, and bend over like an old woman to pick them up, creaking and achy.

Mika meets me at the tree line. He gathers the stuff when I drop it at his feet, and leads me away. I don't know where we go.

All I register for the rest of this day, and the next, is the sound of the two cannons that go off shortly after we're a safe distance away.


	11. Another Girl on Fire

Days, what feels like years, later, I've recovered from the worst of my wounds.

Mika and I have switched roles, or rather, he's finally gotten to play the role he's so good at: Being nice.

The whole time I was sick he was a sweet little nursemaid, making me take my antibiotics, cleaning my head wound, folding his shirt for me to use as a pillow.

I wonder if he's trying to make up for the shock of realizing that he has it in him to kill someone. At least his first kill was a real jerk, one of the monsters who threw Pec in the drill fly nest and left him to die. I feel almost good about Block's death.

Mika found a massive set of tree roots for us to hide in. He made sure I ate three times a day, drank once an hour except while we slept.

The festering on my arm wound is completely gone now. It's just a giant scab that's healing fine, as long as I resist the urge to scratch it. The antibiotics are also keeping my other scratches, the ones Chetty gave me, from becoming infected.

The wound on my back has scabbed over, too, though I still have to sleep on my stomach to make sure it heals without fusing itself to the back of my shirt.

I'm over my concussion. The giant goose-egg that rose in the back of my head where Block hit me has gone down.

It's time for action. The feast fight will only hold the audience for so long. Two days with no deaths – it's time for us to go hunting.

There are five of us left.

Jax and Chetty, both infected with violent insanity, maybe permanently. Both too dangerous to consider attacking now.

Soren.

Mika.

Me.

That's it.

I propose we hunt Soren.

Soren, damn him. If he hadn't stolen our water and our weapons, we might not have had to attend the feast at all. With proper hydration, I could have slept off the infection, maybe. Or at least waited until the fight at the feast subsided before I ran in for medicine.

I wouldn't have been so desperate. I would have been armed. Could have killed Chetty.

Soren betrayed Loma and got her killed. He betrayed me, his own district partner, and Mika, a helpless twelve-year-old. What could have been going through his head? Even in the extremities of the Games, you rarely see such cowardly behavior…if only because it ultimately loses you sponsors.

"But how will we find him?" Mika asks.

I notice he doesn't protest against the _idea_ of going after Soren. In the first few days of the Games, he would have. He's getting used to all this.

The thought that has been haunting the back of my consciousness for the whole Games comes rushing forward now, with so few of us left:

_Soon it will be time to abandon him._

I've been thinking about it hard. About what I want.

Could I possibly abandon Mika? He feels like my son, the way we've been so attached, the way I've been watching over him.

And now I owe him more than ever, since he's been watching over me.

Maybe I could abandon him. If I did it nicely, just said it was time to separate. What if he cried, though?

I know I couldn't kill him. I'm sure of that. If he's to die, I'll leave him to the Gamemakers or the other players.

But I don't want him to die.

I watch his baby face as he chews his dried meat, watch the freckles on the tip of his cute little nose, and I can't stand the thought of hearing his cannon go off.

But if he lives…

It's not just my life at stake here. I have District Twelve to think about. My family, my friends, my community, we'd all have food for a year if I won. The year Peeta and Katniss won was amazing. For once, there were no starvation deaths in Twelve.

If I lose, there will be. If I lose on purpose, the starvations, the exposure deaths in District Twelve next year will be my fault.

Would they forgive me? Would my parents forgive me for not coming home?

But all this is a little premature. I haven't decided to die for Mika yet. I want to live, very much. I just can't reconcile myself to the thought of his death.

Anyway. Right now we have to think about the other District Twelver. Soren.

"Where would a coward go?" I say. "Wherever there's the most hiding places. And far from the other players."

"The thickest part of the woods," says Mika. "The labyrinth."

That's what we've come to call it, anyway.

The woods are in a ring around the Cornucopia, and we've discovered that at one point in the ring, the trunks are too close together to make travel there practical. Soren will have nestled himself inside that labyrinth, I'm sure of it. He won't have gone to the beach. Won't be braving the barren fields, nor the exposed rocks, nor the wide part of the woods, where the other tributes are almost certainly living.

He'll be there, waiting for us to kill each other. He won't come out until there's just one of us left. That's the kind of person he is.

And we're going to have to be the ones to go in and find him, because Jax and Chetty are too messed up to form any kind of hunting strategy. They've just been roaming the woods like wolves. They came close to us one day. We know because we found the carcass of a doe they, or at least one of them, killed. They tore it to shreds.

But they didn't find us. They probably could have if they were in their right minds, and tracking properly, but they aren't.

Mika and I walk deep into the forest until the foliage is so thick we are making progress of maybe ten feet a minute.

"We still have the lighter fluid," I say. "We could start a forest fire. Burn him out."

"He won't burn to death, will he?" asks Mika. "We'll just make him run out, and kill him normal?"

"Yep," I say. "Kill him normal. Good old normal club to the head."

I'm joking, but Mika seems genuinely comforted.

We travel upwind of the labyrinth.

All day we gather kindling, and we build a flammable wall twenty feet wide.

Instead of spraying the lighter fluid over a wide area, I leave it all in the bottle in the midst of the kindling. After we light this fire, I want to have time to get away. This set-up will act as a time bomb, giving us maybe ten minutes before the bottle of fluid explodes, setting off a real forest fire.

I'm about to do it. I have the lighter in my hands, ready to set the first flame.

Mika stops me.

His hand, ice cold, clamps over my wrist.

"What…?"

He just points, terror written on every line of his body, on every hair.

I turn and find myself face to face with Chetty.

She's naked, except for the dirt and blood that covers her.

Her eyes show she's still infected.

She's a wild animal.

Mika hides behind me as she advances, wolf-like, grinning her gory, bony grin.

"Aw," she says. "Widdle Mika and his babysitter. How cute. How. Freakin'. Adorable."

I put the lighter in my pocket, drop the backpack, lift my club. It's a fair fight.

"Mika," I say without looking at him, "Get out of here. Take the pack. Meet me… Meet me where we hid from the Careers, the night with the snakes. Do you think you can find it?"

He's hugging me tightly, and I feel him nod.

Chetty's getting closer. She's going to strike soon.

"Now, Mika!" I snap. "Go!"

His arms detach themselves from my waist, and he goes.

Chetty's eyes follow him hungrily, but she doesn't try to pursue him. She knows she has to go through me.

I notice her leg is still messed up, even worse, now. She hasn't been treating it. She has a limp. That's good.

I don't think I've ever seen a girl my age naked like this before. Her dark nipples are distracting. I wonder if they're censoring this for the home viewers.

"So cute," she repeats. "I could just eat. You. Up. Both of you."

She's in swinging range now.

I swing.

Miss.

She takes advantage, leaping into the space where I just swung, knocking my club away.

Then it's a repeat of the feast fight.

At first I try to gouge my fingers into her wounded leg, but its like she can't feel pain. The venom must have done that to her. It's a major disadvantage, because I can definitely feel pain, and it scares me. All the healing has cleared my head, made pain even more intense than it was at the feast.

We roll through brambles, slam up against trees.

She's trying to get her teeth in me. After Mika did it once, I've developed a powerful fear of teeth. I manage to wrench back every time, adrenaline and fear giving me strength.

But she's full of adrenaline too.

We're working our way deeper into the labyrinth now. I'm cut all over, and so is she. Twigs stab into us everywhere we turn.

_Just when I got my other wounds healed up_, I think. I'm running out of clear patches of skin, I've been injured so many times in these Games. Will the Capitol people be able to put me back together again?

Deeper and deeper.

I'm backing away from Chetty, controlling the direction of the fight, and I find, to my surprise, I know where I'm going. I have a plan.

We've passed the wall of kindling.

Now we're right where I want us to be.

With one last rush of desperation, I throw Chetty off me and turn my back on her. I hurl myself into a pile of wood.

The pile where we set the bottle of lighter fluid.

I've got it. I've got the cap off.

Then Chetty's back.

Her teeth are in my neck.

Worse than that, she's found my neck wound, the hole Loma punched in my trachea. It had closed, but Chetty pries it open, hooking a finger in, yanking me back towards her, ripping me from the inside out.

Screaming, I manage to pull my arm up, to dump the lighter fluid on her head. Some of it gets on me. Hopefully not a lot.

Her teeth, my neck, the pain…

I can't do anything else until her finger is out of my neck. I pry her off. Blood spurts from the wound, in time with my heartbeats. Jesus. I'm going to bleed to death.

But the pain is less, now. Enough for me to get the lighter out of my pocket.

Turn on her.

Ignite a spark.

That's all it takes.

She lights up like a firework, and after a few seconds, it seems she can feel some pain after all.

I leave her rolling on the forest floor, trying to put out the flames. She won't succeed. The lighter fluid soaked her hair. Her head, her neck, her arms and hands, they're all on fire.

I stumble out of the labyrinth.

Past the tree line.

It's longer than I like before Chetty's cannon goes off.

I stop in the barren field, completely exposed but not caring, and rest. I sit straight up to keep my neck wounds above my heart. I hold my hands on them – one in the front, over my trachea, one in the back, where Chetty bit me. I hold in the blood for an hour, maybe two, until I'm sure I'm not going to die.

As I sit there, I watch the fire that started with Chetty grow in the deepest part of the woods.

Soon the darkness, the eternal night, lifts.

The whole island is lit up by a forest fire that I started with a girl's body.

Katniss, the other Girl on Fire, sends me a tiny roll of bandages. The roll contains only a few inches. Enough to make an X over my trachea hole, and a big square over Chetty's bite.

That's all I'll need.

These games are almost over.

Twenty down.

Three to go.

One of them is Mika.

I sigh and drag myself to my feet. I have to go find Mika. Make sure he hasn't gotten into trouble.


	12. The Last Night

Even across the mile of bare field, I can feel the heat from the forest fire. All those needles on the forest floor, plus the lack of rain, have made it a tinder box. I wonder if the Gamemakers are going to let the whole thing burn up. After that, there will be nowhere for any of us to hide, except the inefficient ring of rocks.

There, up ahead. Mika's and my rock.

It suddenly occurs to me that he might not be there. That he might have gotten lost, or trapped, on his way out of the forest.

I might have burned him to death.

My breath catches. I start running.

Snerk!

Something's on my ankle!

I yelp, thinking it's a snake, but it's not. It's a snare. A twine snare. One of Mika's.

"Sorry, Cora!" Mika says. He runs out from behind another rock, nearby. "I was setting them up to maybe catch Jax or Soren, in case they came. I thought I would hear you coming, and I could warn you."

I laugh at the idea that one of Mika's little snares could slow either Soren or Jax down. They're both big boys.

It is a good little snare, though. I find I can't untie Mika's tight knot. I have to use my scissors to get it off.

"Was that Chetty's cannon?" Mika asks.

"Yeah," I say, then I remember that they're both District Elevens. "Sorry, Mika. I know you knew her."

He looks a little shell-shocked. "How did she die?" he asks in a small voice.

Sigh. Sigh sigh sigh. "I lit the fire we set," I say, somewhat honestly. "She got caught in it."

He looks at the ground.

"She was way beyond caring," I say quickly. "You saw her. She'd gone feral. She wasn't even human anymore."

He sniffles. His hair has grown a little, it's in his eyes. I brush it away.

Then I pull him into a tight hug and he cries on me, like he cried on me our very first night in the Games.

"It's almost over, baby," I say. "I promise, it's almost over. Haven't I taken good care of you so far?"

He blows his nose on my shirt and squeaks out a "yes."

It's true, I realize. I'm not just saying it. I have taken _excellent_ care of Mika. Such good care that, while I'm a patchwork of scabs and bruises and chunks bitten out of me, and I've been knocked unconscious and poisoned and sickened, Mika has not been physically harmed in these Games. He hasn't even had to go a day without food or water, or a night in the cold.

That's practically a first for any tribute.

There was the snake bite, I guess. So I'm not perfect. But I sure have been a good babysitter.

The fire grows, and we just watch it. It's pretty, turning the violet sky a gentle light pink.

Birds start fleeing the forest, animals too. I decide we ought to wait out the night on top of our old rock. Don't want to get eaten in the night by some mutt we smoked out.

_What have we done?_ I wonder. What will tomorrow look like, with all the deadly animals and humans on the island exposed to each other?

I get worried enough that I climb back down the rock and tear some branches off nearby scrub bushes.

Mika and I spend the rest of the evening breaking twigs off them, sharpening the edges on our rock bed, fashioning them into four weapons: Two crude spears and two crude clubs. One of each for both of us.

We eat a wonderful dinner of canned soup, listen to the anthem, and watch Chetty's face light up the sky. Her features are obscured by the firelight.

It's a warm night. We barely need the blanket.

The smell of smoke and the white-noise crackle of the flames lulls us to sleep.

I wonder where Jax and Soren are sleeping tonight.


	13. Monster

Gentle rain wakes me.

I snap alert, terrified.

Rain in the Games is only good maybe half the time. If it's water, it's fine, who cares? But sometimes it's acid rain. Or blood rain. Or rain filled with insects, tiny, biting frogs, you name it.

This rain is not water. It's dirty, a muddy purple, the same color as the sky.

I grab Mika, wake him, make him take shelter under our blanket, which is waterproof as well as heat-retaining. There are already spots streaking his face.

After the initial minute of panic, we agree that the rain, gross as it is, does not appear to be harmful. Just dark and dirty-looking, and purple, like the whole Games have been.

We sit back and marvel at the new landscape that has been revealed during the night.

What our fire didn't level, in terms of plant life, the Gamemakers did. There must have been earthquakes during the night, because even the small hills under the forest have been flattened. We can see the whole island, a black circle under the purple sky. It's too big and dark to tell if Soren and Jax are out there somewhere, but I can now make out the horizon, the ocean line, in the far distance.

Animal skeletons litter the center. There were some big animals in there. One looks like a hundred-tooth grizzly bear, a mutt used in past Games.

Only the edges of the circle remain untouched. What was once the most exposed place is now the best place to hide. Rocks and shrubbery, and the beach, where maybe someone could hide under the water.

Only Soren will be hiding, though.

Jax is too messed up to think of hiding, if he's in Chetty's condition or anything close.

"What do we do?" asks Mika. "Just wait for them to find us?"

"I guess we should set a trap," I say.

I don't know anything about setting traps, though.

All those years I spent watching the Hunger Games, and I never got a sense of how those crazy springing nets work, or lasso snares, or anything involving knots. The physics didn't make sense to me.

Not that we have rope or anything anyway. Just Mika's little squirrel snares spread all around our home.

As we slowly get soaked, the horror, the terror, the exhaustion of the past week seems to drench me too. I think of my fights with Pec, Block, Chetty, even Mika. The thought of two more seems unreasonable. It's too much to bear.

How much more is the next two or three days going to hurt? What nightmare forms will my body pass through, which parts will swell up, which parts will gush blood?

How injured will I be by the time I'm supposed to take out Mika?

A giant sob escapes me, startling Mika.

"Cora? Don't cry, Cora. Why are you crying? We're so close!" he says.

He hugs me like the little teddy bear he is, and I accept his comfort. But he's wrong. We're not close.

_We_ can never be close.

_I'm_ close.

_He's_ close.

But the odds of the both of us, _we_, surviving, has always been, and still is, zero.

Which will it be?

I want to cry myself out there on top of the rock, but we're wet and exposed. Though Mika's trying to be nice, he's starting to get uncomfortable with us sitting up like this. I can tell by the way he keeps looking around fearfully. He doesn't say anything, though. He's too sweet to tell me to hurry up and get over whatever's wrong with me.

Still choking on my sobs, I help him shove our stuff, now entirely soaked except the canned food, into our pack, and we slide off our rock.

"We'll track them," Mika says. "We'll look for signs of where they're hiding, and once we've found them, then we'll come up with a plan to catch them."

"Okay," I say. Deep breaths. "Okay."

"Okay. Okay." A voice echoes mine, then chuckles low.

It's not Mika's voice.

Mika and I start. We turn, looking for the source of that sinister, deep bass growl.

The rain is pouring down. Purple is in my eyes, and with that plus the dark, I can't see a thing.

I scramble for my night vision glasses.

They are knocked out of my hands.

Mika cries out and tries to run from the giant looming over us, the giant that has stepped silently out of the shadows, who is so filthy he was indistinguishable from the rock he stood beside even though we weren't ten feet from him.

Jax.

As Mika turns to run, Jax's long arm shoots out and grabs him by the collar.

Lifts him six inches into the air.

Hurls him against the rock.

Mika smacks up on it, cracks his head, and collapses face-first in the mud before I even have a chance to react.

I scream his name.

He isn't dead. There wasn't a cannon. He's stirring. If he can get his face out of the mud, he won't drown. Maybe he can crawl away while Jax kills me…

Which he surely will.

Jax turns from Mika to face me and I gasp at what the venom has done to him.

To think, I used to believe Jax was this year's Finnick Odair. A handsome warrior, the one who the girls all swooned over.

He has transformed. Not into the wild wolf-like thing that Chetty became, but into a different kind of animal.

The venom has spread from his eyes. Black and red veins are now woven across his face, pulsing furiously. His cheeks are sunken, his teeth, broken. Probably from chomping on the bones of the other tributes.

His hair has fallen out.

And he's grown. He's not wearing a shirt, and veins have popped out all over his engorged muscles.

I should never have set those snakes in his bed. Not when I knew the Gamemakers were on my side.

I've helped them create a monster.

Now that monster is going to eat me.

"Cora Walker," Jax says. His voice is an octave too low. A demon's voice.

But his next words frighten me more than the voice.

"You did this to me."

_Yes, I did,_ I think, _but how do you know that?_

"I almost caught Soren yesterday," says Jax. He's standing unnaturally still. He knows I can't dream of running from him, that if I try, he can reach out and squeeze me to death with one arm. "He was running from the fire. We ended up on different sides of a ravine, and he got away, but before he did, he yelled at me across the gap. Told me about the snakes. That it was your idea."

It was Loma's idea, but that doesn't matter now. I carried it out.

Damn Soren to hell. Jax would have killed me anyway, but now he's going to stretch it out. Make it hurt. Make me pay.

I just hope Mika is able to crawl to safety while I'm dying.

Jax leisurely reaches out one tree-branch sized arm and places it on my shoulder.

I remember watching him fight Jewel at Cornucopia. At the time, I thought that a single punch from one of his giant hands could kill me.

Now one of those hands has got me, and I wonder how much it will hurt. Which bones he'll break in which order. Which organs he'll rip out of my stomach with raw strength alone.

Lightning strikes behind him, showing me his face in all its horrible detail.

He starts to squeeze my shoulder.

"What's wrong, Cora?" Jax asks coolly. "Don't like what you see?"

He yanks me towards him so fast my head whips back. I stupidly worry about whiplash until his face is an inch from mine, and he's practically breathing his bloody breath into my mouth.

"I used to be handsome," he says, spitting flecks of blood onto my face. "Do you think I'm handsome, Cora? You should. You made me look this way."

"I'm sorry," I whisper pitifully. I mean it. I really do.

"The girl next door," he says. His other hand rises to my face. He cups it so I can't move. "You still look good. Little blondie. Good enough to eat."

I'm shaking violently. He's going to bite my nose off.

But he doesn't.

Instead, he licks my face. Hard, from the bottom of my chin to my cheek.

I try to recoil, but his grip is iron. I can't move even a little.

With that grip, he half-pushes, half-carries me backwards until I ram up against another rock formation. He's pushing his whole body against mine, his veiny, muscular torso flush against my chest.

He licks the other side of my face. Goes down to my neck. My collarbone. Half biting, half kissing.

"Last girl on the island," he grinds out. "Lucky you. A lot of girls would kill to be where you are right now. Innocent Cora. Not as innocent as everybody thinks, or you wouldn't have made it this far."

He's ripping my shirt open.

This can't be happening.

"Help! Help me! Stop him!" I scream to the sky, to the Gamemakers. This has never happened in the Games, not once, ever. The audience will hate it. Claudius Templesmith will save me, he won't let this happen on camera.

Jax pulls back from dragging his broken teeth along my chest.

"Who do you think's going to help you, Cora? The Gamemakers put you here. They helped you do this to me." He's crushing me against the rock with the length of his body. "They're as sick as I am. They want this. They're loving it."

He shoves his tongue in my mouth, smashes my head backwards, crushes my gums till they bleed. He doesn't pull away until I've nearly strangled. I try to spit out his taste.

"And after I'm done with you, they're going to cheer when I eat your fucking heart."

He's right.

I will myself not to cry, to just endure my humiliation, and then my death, with something like courage.

Jax rams one knee between mine. His huge hands are shoving their way into my clothes. He drags bruising trenches in my skin with his fingers, scratches me with fingernails that have grown into claws.

Then, suddenly, his grip on me gets looser. He still has me pinned, but now he's pulling back and staring at me in shock. His demon eyes widen.

He releases one hand, then the other, and I slide to the ground.

Jax, jaw hanging open, turns away from me.

Lightning hits a bush twenty feet from us, illuminating the thick spear protruding from his back.

It also illuminates Soren, who threw the spear.

Jax falls to his knees.

I scramble backwards, out of his reach.

Soren, with a calm smirk plastered on his traitorous face – how did I ever imagine he was cute? – approaches with measured steps. The wind whips his wet hair around as he removes the spear from Jax's back, then rams it in again. And again.

It takes five stabs into that massive body before Jax dies, and his cannon goes off. We can barely hear it over the sound of the storm.

"Thanks for distracting him," Soren says. "He was the one I wasn't sure I could kill. You gave me the chance." He smiles. "I'll remember you in my victory speech."

He's covered in weapons. I recognize Loma's axe. My club. A bow and arrow and knives, no doubt stolen from other tributes in the dead of night. The pack on his back probably carries the water bottles he stole from Mika.

"You're a rat, Soren," I say, struggling to my feet.

The wind is pulling at my shirt, which Jax ripped clean down the middle. I hold it shut with both hands, hating the idea that it makes me look like I'm ashamed of myself in front of Soren, of all people.

"A rat? Why?" He's running his hands over his arsenal, picking his weapon with care. He can afford to take his time. "Because I decided to survive? Isn't that the same decision you made when you knocked Zink's face in?"

He has selected the axe. "Or when you used the snake venom to kill the Careers? Excellent job, by the way. I can't believe you made it work. Loma would be proud."

"I didn't _betray_ anybody," I snarl. "We were your allies. You left us. Stole our supplies. You sent Jax after me. We would never have done that to you."

"No," he says, rolling his eyes. "You'd just set a forest fire and hope I burn to death. You're a real hero, Cora. Now why don't you die like one?"

He closes the ten feet between us, swinging the axe over his head.

Something trips him.

He falls on his face in the mud. The axe lands next to my hand.

"What the…?" Soren sputters, rushing to regain his feet.

He can't. He's caught.

He yanks at his leg. I see what has him, and start to giggle.

One of Mika's snares. The twine is thin, but not so thin Soren can break it just by pulling on it. He yanks frantically and only manages to drive the twine deeper into his ankle.

I pick up the axe.

"Don't you dare."

Damn it. Soren is still armed. He whips the bow into position, snatches an arrow, begins nocking it.

I realize that, armed as he is, he's too much of a threat for me to try to take on in my condition, even though he's tied to the ground.

I run.

I have to find Mika.

It's easy enough. He left a huge trail because he was crawling.

He's a hundred yards from where Jax threw him.

He's tied up in a net. A net no doubt set by Soren some time in the night.

Soren. He's going to kill us both.

As I desperately begin hacking at the net to try to free Mika, I count the seconds until Soren frees himself and finds us. We have less than a minute, surely.

And I realize something else.

The beach… the beach that was a mile away in the night… is now much, much closer to us.

Is the rain flooding the island?

No.

The island is sinking into the ocean.


	14. Soren

Mika is screaming my name. The net has him good, and he's been struggling, tying himself up worse.

I hack frantically at the net.

An awful thought slams into me like a sledgehammer.

_Leave him. This is your chance._

Everyone will understand if I abandon Mika now. It's perfect. There's no time to get him out. If I stay, Soren will kill us both. He'll shoot me in the back while I'm trying to cut this net.

History will forgive me.

If I run, Mika will be killed by Soren or he'll drown in the rising ocean. It will just be me and Soren. I have an axe. I can swim. I would have a fifty-fifty chance of winning.

_Leave him. Leave him._

Mika's face is visible through the netting. His huge gray eyes meet mine. He has to know what I'm thinking.

His lips tremble.

"Don't cry," I hear myself saying. "Hold still. I can get it. I can do it. Don't cry. It's going to be okay."

I continue cutting at the net. I'm not even looking behind me for Soren. The fear in Mika's eyes has yanked at my heart, made me desperate to see him safe again.

I don't remember if protecting Mika was ever really entirely an act.

If it was, it isn't anymore.

I'm in the habit of protecting this baby boy, and I'm not going to leave him, not to Soren or the Gamemakers.

Hack. Hack. Thirty seconds have passed. My torn shirt has flapped open, but I don't care.

"Cora, behind you!" Mika screams.

I turn. Soren is there, an arrow aimed at my heart. He fires.

But he's not trained with a bow and arrow, and the wind doesn't help him. The arrow whizzes past my ear.

A huge wave surges up, splashing against the cliff line just beyond us.

The island is sinking faster now.

That means I have a time limit.

I have to kill Soren before the waves reach Mika, who is still trapped in the net. If I can't get to him soon, he'll drown.

I do the only thing Soren, coward that he is, can't be expecting. I run at him.

He's alarmed. He grabs for another weapon, one of his many knives.

I swing the axe and hit his hand.

"Bitch!" he cries. "Bitch! I'll kill you."

What a pansy. I didn't even take the hand off. He's only cut.

I'm breathing hard now, and it feels funny. Oh, I know why. It's because somewhere in the fight with Jax, I lost the bandage covering the hole in my throat. I'm sucking wet air through my chest as well as my mouth.

The sensation makes me feel superhuman. It gives me courage.

Soren's up. He's coming at me.

We trade blows, inexpertly. Neither of us is a good hand-to-hand fighter. And we're handicapped by the rain, which has turned the black earth beneath us into slippery sludge. We're both falling constantly.

I wonder if the audience is enjoying our incompetence, or annoyed by it.

Another wave crashes at the edge of the cliffs, and this time it spills over, soaking Soren and me from the knees down. It's cold, but we're already too wet to mind much.

The wave pulls back, sucking us with it. We end up balancing there, just at the edge, with the ocean raging beneath us.

I'm on top of Soren.

"Get off, you idiot!" he yells in my face.

"Why would I do that?" I punch him, but there's not much strength behind it. My axe, I need my axe. It's fallen just out of arm's reach.

"The next wave will pull us off! You'll kill us both!"

He's right.

And the next wave is coming. It's almost upon us.

I stagger to my feet and try to retreat.

Soren hooks out a leg and trips me.

A dirty trick. A schoolboy bully trick.

_Traitor, traitor, traitor._

He frantically crawls over me, gets a knife out – he's going to try to stab me before the wave hits.

He's too late.

The wave rushes over us, heavy and black.

Soren grabs at me to try to anchor himself.

I grab at anything. The grass, the ground.

I'm going to get pulled over the edge, to smash on the rocks below, or to drown.

My hand closes over the axe.

The wave sweeps back, yanking Soren and me over the edge.

But I don't fall.

I'm left hanging over the side by one arm, by Loma's axe. I have managed to bury its head in a crack between two rocks.

Soren is hanging onto my foot.

He is _heavy_.

The wave pulls all the way back, exposing rocks in the froth fifty feet below us.

I start kicking.

"Cora, don't!" Soren yells.

I'm losing my grip. If he doesn't let go, we'll both fall.

"Please!" he begs. "Please. Cora. I'm your district partner. Don't do this. Help me."

That bastard. After everything he's done, he wants sympathy now? The Games have so hardened me that the thought only makes me laugh.

"Mika's my partner," I say.

I kick Soren in the face.

He falls to his death, screaming "Bitch!" on the way down.

His cannon fires, but I barely hear it with the way my blood is rushing in my ears as I climb back onto the cliff edge.

The wave is returning. I have to get to Mika.

_And then what?_

It's just the two of us left. Me and Mika. One of us will win the Games today. The other one will die.

My plan to protect him has worked too well.


	15. The Final Two

I am forced to endure another wave before reaching Mika again.

He's still trapped in the net, and half-drowned. He's shivering, too.

Beyond pain, beyond feeling anything at all, I begin hacking at the net again with Loma's axe.

I make a hole big enough for Mika to fit through. I yank him out.

He stands there in front of me, shivering, and I suddenly realize how I must look.

My clothes are in tatters from my fights with Soren and Jax.

I'm covered in wounds. I have a hole in my neck. My mouth is bleeding. My hair and skin are filthy with the dark rain.

And what must the look on my face be? I just fought for my life twice. Threw a boy off a cliff. Clawed my way to the top, swam through powerful, icy waves that salted my wounds. Hacked at the net with abandon, with strength borne of desperation.

I'm not the Girl Next Door anymore.

I'm a beast. A god damned survival machine. Even I didn't know I had this kind of determination buried inside me.

I see Mika's trembling worsen as he realizes he's at my mercy.

"Get the pack," I say. Half my air wheezes out through my neck hole. "We've got to move."

Mika is frozen in place.

"Do what I say, Mika. The island is sinking. We have to get to the Cornucopia. It's the highest spot."

"Are you going to kill me?" he asks through chattering teeth.

"Shut up," I say, furious that he doubts me after what I've just done for him. "If I wanted you dead, you'd be dead right now. Get the pack."

He gets it. We begin the trek toward the center of the island.

The waves advance steadily behind us. We don't have to run, but by the end of the day, we'll be swimming, no matter what.

After a mile, Mika puts his hand in mine.

We walk in silence. I can practically feel the eyes of Panem on us. On me. Wondering what I'm going to do.

It's entirely up to me now. I understand that.

I can kill Mika.

I can abandon Mika to die.

Or I can lose.

District Twelve needs food. I can't forget that. If I win, it's not just me that will benefit.

But surely District Eleven has starving people too.

Mika's chattering teeth pull me out of my thoughts. He's really shaking now. So hard he can barely walk.

His face is discolored. His ears are red, and they feel like ice cubes when I touch them.

Hypothermia.

For the last mile, I have to carry him. At least the rain stops, making the walk easier.

In my arms, he goes completely limp with exhaustion. His face finds a comfortable spot on my shoulder, and I feel his rail-thin chest move in and out, feel the warmth of his weak breath on my neck.

He weighs nothing. He was tiny before the Games began, and he's lost weight in the Arena.

We reach the Cornucopia.

I set him down.

"Can you climb it, Mika?" I ask. "If we can rest on the top, it'll buy us some time. Half an hour, maybe, to think of something."

He nods silently and begins the climb. I toss the pack up to him, then take a few minutes to look around. Maybe something was left over from the feast. Maybe something that can be used as a flotation device.

Nothing. Of course. The people who leveled mountains last night weren't going to leave a raft lying around for us to find.

I sigh.

The waves are advancing. I have no doubt that once they reach us, they will turn huge and drown us. Or a sea monster will eat us. It'll be something epic, something awful.

I'd rather end the Games on my own terms.

I climb the outer rim of the Cornucopia and meet Mika there.

He has gotten the blanket out. It's soaked, but he wrapped it around himself anyway.

We watch the rising water.

It's coming faster than I thought.

It's only a foot below us now.

"I'm tired," Mika says, misery and cold turning the words into a sob.

"I know, sweetie. Me too."

"I'm hungry."

I smile. "We still have food. Want to have a last meal, on the Gamemakers?"

He sniffles and nods.

I reach for the pack, but he says, "I'll do it," and like a little waiter, he carefully sets our table. He lays the now-empty pack out on the Cornucopia like a tablecloth, sets us each a water bottle, opens our two last cans of soup.

By the time he's done this, the water is at our ankles.

I take a bite. "Delicious," I say. "You're the best cook I ever met, Mika."

He's crying.

"Hey," I say. "Stop that. This is _my _last meal. It isn't yours."

"How do you know?" he asks. "How do you know they aren't going to kill me first?"

"Because you're going to kill me, sweetie," I say.

He won't look at me.

"I've still got the axe," I continue. My voice is steady. I've made up my mind.

"After we eat, you're going to hug me and kiss me goodbye, and then you're going to cut my throat. You're strong enough. One swing, then you can go home. I promise."

He doesn't say anything. I wash my soup down with a big swig of water. No need to save it anymore.

"You would let me?" Mika asks. He still won't meet my eyes.

"Yeah, I would. Did you really think I was going to let you die, after all this, Mika?"

He looks lost.

"I'm sorry, Cora," he says. Now he's really weeping. He finally meets my eyes. Why is he so sad? "I thought you weren't sure. So I… That's why I…"

My stomach twists.

It twists further.

Pain blooms inside me. I'm on fire.

"I put it in your water," Mika says. "While you were looking for a raft. I'm sorry, Cora. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't want to die. I don't want to die. I'm sorry."

The black apple poison. I forgot all about it.

Mika has poisoned me.

I was ready to die for him, ready to force him to kill me, so I don't know why this hurts my feelings so much.

"It's okay," I grind out. But oh, it hurts.

The water is at our waists now.

I lean back and try to float. Try to just go to sleep. But the pain in my stomach is incredible.

Mika hugs me and I let him. He strokes my hair, like he did before, when I was sick.

Soon it will be over.

He won, fair and square. It's okay. It's what I wanted. I didn't want to be the animal I've become, the girl with shredded clothes and shredded skin, who kills without hesitation.

Mika still has a chance to grow up to be a nice person. He's young.

He's the right choice.

As I drift into unconsciousness and the pain dissipates, I see a giant tidal wave rising behind Mika.

Smart kid, I think. He got me just in time.


	16. The Winner

**Well, this was a long story, and I hope you find the ending satisfying. Thank you for your interest in Cora and Mika's journey.**

**Always review.**

**###**

I'm awake.

Why am I awake?

I'm supposed to be dead.

I lift my head, look around.

A hospital room. A nice one, not an apothecary's back room like the ones we go to in District Twelve.

Katniss is sitting by my bed.

"Mika?" I ask. "Where's Mika?"

In the two years since she won the Hunger Games, Katniss has learned to control her expressions very carefully. For the cameras.

So she manages to look emotionless as she tells me, "Mika didn't make it."

I look down at myself. My skin, my ruined, ripped-up skin, is soft and whole again. Like I was never hurt.

"You won, Cora," says Katniss.

"No," I whisper. "Mika won."

"You did your best," says Katniss. "I was…" She hesitates, and I hear her breath catch. "_Peeta_ was proud of you," she finishes.

"But I saved Mika," I say. "I carried him through the whole Games. I died before the wave hit."

"You fell unconscious before the wave hit," says Katniss. "But you were alive for a minute after. The wave hit both of you. Mika drowned before you did. He was already in hypothermic shock. His heart stopped beating first."

My jaw is hanging open.

Katniss sighs and rises. She hates heavy emotional stuff, I know. And she must have had almost as bad a week as I have, trying to keep me alive.

She's not as mature as you would think. She's only a year older than me, and she's had a rough three years. It's too much to ask her to stick around to comfort me.

"Get ready for your victory party," she says. "Congratulations, Cora."

She starts to leave the room, then turns and adds, "I'm sorry."

After she's gone, I stagger to the mirror.

Amazing. They have completely restored me. I'm clean. My hair is shiny and blonde, my skin glowing. Even my eyes seem bluer.

They've reset my loose tooth. Repaired everything, even the hole in my neck.

I look like the Girl Next Door again.

I'm warm and dry and healthy. Somewhere Mika's tiny body is cold. Dead.

And starting next year, I'm going to have Katniss' job. I'll be babysitter to an unending line of Mikas. Little kids in my care who will die on my watch. Maybe once every ten years I'll save one.

I should have let Soren win.

I spend an hour crying and vomiting into the sink.

Then I find that reserve of strength, the one that so surprised me in the Arena. The one that gave me the courage to kill, to defend Mika, to die with dignity.

Winners aren't allowed to be miserable. It's a sign of disrespect. It can get your family killed. Your district punished.

I'll have to mourn Mika…and Loma…Zink, Pec, all the others… in the privacy of my new home. Once I'm allowed to go home.

So I wash my face, pull on a smile - a big white Girl Next Door smile - and step out of the room to meet the cameras.

**The End**


	17. Recap

**76th Annual Hunger Games**

**The Contestants**

District, Female (age), Male (age)

1 - Glory (18), Jax (18)

2 - Jewel (18), Block (18)

3 - Zink (13), Babel (16)

4 - Serena (18), Moses (18)

5 - Loma (14), Al (15)

6 - Dista (14), Pec (15)

7 - Amelia (13), Milton (17)

8 - Nap (12), Jason (14)

9 - Sarah May (15), Gump (12)

10 - Iggy (13), Rake (17)

11 - Chetty (17), Mika (12)

12 - Cora (18), Soren (17)

**Order of deaths**

**Day 1 (Cornucopia)**

Jewel (F District 2, age 18)… killed by Jax

Iggy (F District 10, age 13)…killed by Serena and Chetty

Jason (M District 8, age 14)… killed by Gump

Nap (F District 8, age 12)…killed by Glory

Al (M District 5, age 15)…killed by Jax

Sarah May (F District 9, age 15)…killed by Milton

Dista (F District 6, age 14)…killed by Chetty

Babel (M District 3, age 16)…killed by Glory

Rake (M District 10, age 17)…killed by Block

**Day 2**

Zink (F District 3, age 13)…killed by Soren

Gump (M District 9, age 12)…killed by Moses, Milton and Block

Amelia (F District 7, age 13)…killed by the Gamemakers

**Day 3**

Pec (M District 6, age 15)…killed by Cora

Loma (F District 5, age 14)…killed by Jax, Serena, Chetty and Glory

**Day 4**

Serena (F District 4, age 18)…killed by Jax, Chetty and Glory

Glory (F District 1, age 18)…killed by Jax and Chetty

Milton (M District 7, age 17)…killed by the Gamemakers

**Day 5**

No deaths

**Day 6 (The Feast)**

Moses (M District 4, age 18)…killed by Jax and Chetty

Block (M District 2, age 18)…killed by Mika

**Day 7**

No deaths

**Day 8**

No deaths

**Day 9**

Chetty (F District 11, age 17)…killed by Cora

**Day 10**

Jax (M District 1, age 18)…killed by Soren

Soren (M District 12, age 17)…killed by Cora

Mika (M District 11, age 12)…killed by the Gamemakers

**Winner:**

**Cora (F District 12, age 18)**


End file.
